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COPHIIGHT DEPOSm 



EDUCATION 
FOR EFFICIENCY 

A DISCUSSION OF CERTAIN PHASES OF THE 

PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL EDUCATION WITH 

SPECIAL REFERENCE TO ACADEMIC 

IDEALS AND METHODS 



y 



BY 



f- 



Er DAVENPORT, M.Agr., LL.D. 

DEAN OF THE COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE 

AND 

DIRECTOR OF THE AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION 

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 



REVISED EDITION' 



D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS 
BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 



\ • 



Copyright, 1909 and 19 14 
By D. C. Heath & Co, 

I G 4 



SEP -3 iiil4 



C1.A380217 



PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION 

Since the publication of Education for Efficiency some five 
years ago many of its ideals and purposes have been more than 
realized. Probably nothing better expresses the present state of 
mind of most educators than the following series of propositions 
published in a recent report of the Illinois Educational Commision : 

I. That the high school completes the formal education for 
most of its students, and this fact rather than the preparation for 
college should dominate its policy. 

II. That the high school curriculum should, therefore, dis- 
tinctly recognize the vocational needs of the pupil, defining voca- 
tion broadly enough to cover all the useful activities, ranging from 
industry for the masses to hterature, business, and art for the few. 

III. That at least one-fourth of the student's time in high school 
should be devoted to this vocational work, and three-fourths to 
non- vocational, upon the ground that the student, in order to 
make a useful member of society, should, for a portion of his time 
each day after reaching the high school age, become possessed of 
a deep sense of vocational consciousness demanding special train- 
ing looking to his own activities, but that at the same time, in 
order to be most effective and rational, he should also devote the 
major portion of his time to what other men have thought and 
said and done, or are preparing to do, and to the facts of nature. 

IV. That the instruction in vocational courses of high schools 
should be as useful for practical purposes as is that in the same 
subjects in schools devoted exclusively to technical training. In 
no other way can the higher phases of public education hold their 
own against the competition of the trade school and prevent its 
supplanting to an undue extent a broader system for the education 
of the young. 

V. That therefore the typical high school should introduce into 
curriculum at the present time at least six vocational courses cor- 
responding to the six broad avenues leading into the chief activ- 
ities of civihzed man ; namely : 

iii 



iv PREFACE 

1. A course leading to the speaking and writing professions 
with language, literature, and history as its main subjects. 

2. A course leading to the scientific professions, especially medi- 
cine and surgery, and devoting its chief attention to biology, physics, 
and chemistry, studies dealing with life and the conditions of life. 

3. A course leading to the profession of farming with special 
reference to the domesticated animals and plants, and to the soil 
as the sustainer of hfe, supported by the physical sciences and by 
the principles of accounting. 

4. A course preparing for useful and artistic construction in the 
building trades and in most lines of manufacture. Here, manual 
training, mathematics, physics, and art should hold the leading 
place. 

5. A course leading to the calHngs of the business world, with 
commercial geography, economics, industrial history, commercial 
arithmetic, commercial law, book-keeping, stenography, and type- 
writing as its most prominent features. 

6. A course dealing with the application of science and of art 
to the affairs of the well-ordered home. Here sewing, cooking, 
food values, marketing, serving, nursing, sanitation, textiles, home 
decoration, and the laws of physical, moral, and mental develop- 
ment in childhood are the special studies. 

The proposed high school course in agriculture published in the 
first edition of this book has now been replaced by the more 
modern course in the report above quoted. While many different 
outlines of study have been successfully taught, this perhaps serves 
well to illustrate the present practice, except that in many instances 
teachers prefer to introduce animal studies during the first year. 

In addition to the formal vocational courses offered in the high 
schools, a good many of these schools are beginning to offer also 
short courses^, part-time courses, night schools, et cetera, thus fully 
occupying a field that has been so extensively advocated for the 
trade school. This, of course, is the only way in which sparsely 
settled districts, like country communities, can have anything like 
well-ordered schools. 

University of Illinois, 
June, 1914. 



CONTENTS 

PAGB 

Introduction i 

PART I 

CHAPTER 

I. Education for Efficiency . . . . . .11 

II. Industrial Education with Special Reference to 

THE High School 37 

III. Industrial Education a Phase of the Problem of 

- Universal Education 60 

IV. The Educative Value of Labor .... 78 
V. The Culture Aim in Education .... 90 

VI. Unity in Education 100 

PART II 

VII. Agriculture in the High Schools .... 124 
VIII. Agriculture in the Elementary Schools . . 138 
IX. Agriculture in the Normal Schools . . .146 
X. The Development of American Agriculture — 

What it is and What it Means . . . .149 
XI. The Meaning of Agriculture . . , . .176 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

INTRODUCTION 
THE RISE OF INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 

It was a great thing when the common man first 
lifted up his head and said, "I, too, will be educated." 

We have entered upon an era of universal education, 
which means the education of all sorts of people for all 
sorts of purposes. From now on therefore education must 
serve not only the exceptional five per cent but the ninety- 
five per cent of common men as well ; it must not only fit 
for the so-called learned professions but it must also train 
for common things, else it is not universal, — a new fact 
that involves, I imagine, a somewhat radical revision of 
our philosophy of education, with a corresponding broad- 
ening of ideals as to the purposes, the materials, and the 
methods of instruction. 

Fifty-seven years ago Professor Jonathan B. Turner 
wrote : ^ 

*'A11 civilized society is, necessarily, divided into two distinct coopera- 
tive, not antagonistic, classes : a small class, whose proper business it is 
to teach the true principles of religion, law, medicine, science, art, and 
literature ; and a much larger class who are engaged in some form of 
labor, in agriculture, commerce, and the arts. For the sake of con- 
venience, we will designate the former the Professional, and the latter the 
Industrial, class, not implying that each may not be equally industrious, 
the one in their intellectual, the other in their industrial, pursuits. 
Probably in no case would society ever need more than five men out of 

1 From "A Plan for an Industrial University," United States Patent Office Report, 1852. 

I 



2 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

one hundred in the professional class, leaving ninety-five in every hun- 
dred in the industrial ; and, so long as so many of our ordinary teachers 
and public men are taken from the industrial class, as there are at present, 
and probably will be for generations to come, we do not really need over 
one professional man for every hundred, leaving ninety-nine in the 
industrial class. 

"The vast difference, in the practical means, of an appropriate 
liberal education, suited to their wants and their destiny, which these 
two classes enjoy, and ever have enjoyed the world over, must have 
arrested the attention of every thinking man. True, the same general 
abstract science exists in the world for both classes alike, but the means 
of bringing this abstract truth into effectual contact with the daily busi- 
ness and pursuits of the one class does exist, while in the other case it 
does not exist and never can till it is new created. 

" The one class have schools, seminaries, colleges, universities, appa- 
ratus, professors, and multitudinous appliances for educating and train- 
ing them for months and years, for the peculiar profession which is to 
be the business of their life ; and they have already created, each class 
for its own use, a vast and voluminous literature, that would wellnigh 
sink a whole navy of ships. 

" But where are the universities, the apparatus, the professors, and the 
literature, specifically adapted to any one of the industrial classes ? 
Echo answers, Where ? In other words, society has become, long since, 
wise enough to know that its teachers need to be educated, but it has 
not become wise enough to know that its workers need education just as 
much. . . . 

"It is said that farmers and mechanics do not and will not read, but 
I say, give them the literature and the education suited to their wants, 
and see if it does not reform and improve them as it has reformed and 
improved their professional brethren. The agricultural classes have no 
congenial literature." 

In these few words Professor Turner outlined both the 
need for education and the character of the education suited 
to the natural needs of industrial people. They were written 
in the early days of the campaign that led up to the Land 
Grant Act of 1862, by which every state has come to have 
at least one college wherein are taught the subjects that 



INTRODUCTION 3 

especially pertain to industrial life, but " without excluding 
other scientific and classical studies." 

This was the first far-reaching step in this country to- 
ward an adequate system of education for industrial people 
as such. Hitherto, to be sure, the colleges had been open 
to young men from the industrial ranks, but the courses 
were adapted to the special needs of Professor Turner's 
five per cent and were silent upon those of the ninety-five. 

If, therefore, an ambitious young man from the indus- 
trial masses perchance entered college to better his con- 
dition, the inevitable consequence was that he deserted the 
ninety-five and joined the five per cent, whereby the indus- 
trial masses remained uneducated and the industries un- 
developed and tending downward as the result of universal 
education, because educational influences were such as to 
abstract from the industries the most ambitious and the 
most capable. 

This draft was felt hardest upon the farm, when the 
great commercial activity following the Civil War drew by 
thousands the best blood out of the country into the city ; 
off the land and into the office ; away from independence 
into dependent positions with small salary. 

The Land Grant Act was the first step in the correcting 
of these evil tendencies, in that agricultural and mechani- 
cal instruction of some sort was provided in every state in 
the Union. It was followed twenty-five years later (1887) 
by the Hatch Act, founding at every agricultural college 
an Experiment Station for the investigation of problems 
peculiarly agricultural and for the publication of the results. 

Thus came to be built up, on the agricultural side at 
least, the literature of which Professor Turner so clearly 
saw the need. This also strengthened the instruction in 
the college, and agricultural as well as engineering colleges 



4 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

in these land-grant institutions were soon filled with stu- 
dents. Thus industrial education became established in 
this country, and first of all on college levels. It yet re- 
mains to be established for the real masses, and the most 
important educational question to-day is how to inaugurate 
an adequate scheme of industrial education of secondary 
grade and below in order to be within the reach of at least 
the greater part of Turner's ninety-five per cent. This 
question has not yet been settled, and it is the conviction 
of the writer that as yet we have not evolved a philosophy 
of education adequate to the task of meeting the logical 
demands of a real system of universal education. 

Gradually, but slowly, men have learned by experience 
that schooling, if it be of a suitable kind, does not neces- 
sarily educate away from industry, and further, that the 
kind of education which fits for industry not only returns 
educated men to industrial life but also and inevitably 
develops the industries to a level that is unattainable except 
through education. 

It was far-sighted educated men like Turner in the 
West and McAlHster, Gregg, Cameron, and Morrill in the 
East that first saw and pointed out the need of industrial edu- 
cation. For a long time the people were apathetic or resist- 
ant. They desired education; indeed they demanded it, 
but it was for the purpose of ** rising above " the ordinary 
walks of life. They chiefly desired education not as a 
source of personal gratification or of added efficiency in 
service, but that they " would not have to work so hard 
as their fathers did," and for a generation or more educa- 
tion was regarded as the avenue out of industry and into 
an " easy place " ; out of humble life into elegance and 
prominence. 

Accordingly, the first attempts at industrial education, 



INTRODUCTION 5 

even when endowed by federal support, were met by any- 
thing but promising results. The only people who sup- 
ported the agricultural colleges were the few who really 
desired their sons to be educated, but had learned by ob- 
servation that the old-line college courses educated away 
from the farm. 

From the first, the attempt to teach industrial courses was 
attended by peculiar difficulties. As Turner had remarked, 
there was no literature. There was lacking, therefore, 
both material and method, and it would take a book sim- 
ply to record the academic blunders and the professional 
shortsightedness that characterized the first quarter of a 
century of this attempt. Teachers were as lacking as was 
appropriate literature, and these have had to be de- 
veloped by the slow evolution of internal processes, because 
we have beheld the unparalleled prospect of a generation 
of self-made teachers evolving with their own experience 
both the matter and the methods of an entirely new educa- 
tional field. 

Quite naturally the first attempts at teaching were little 
more than an effort to train in handicraft, developing the 
art side of industries in imitation of the obsolete apprentice 
system, and it has taken a generation of experience to 
teach us that what is needed in industrial education is not 
so much the art as the science of the craft ; not so much 
the practice as the principle, w^hich only is educative, and 
on which only the industry and the man can be developed 
together. 

Harassing and full of delay as all these troubles have 
been, we have gradually learned two fundamental facts, 
viz. first, that the industrial man is the better for being 
suitably educated; and second, that industry develops with 
that sort of education of industrial people which retains 



6 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

them among the industries and does not drive or lead them 
out. Agriculture, like engineering, is rapidly becoming 
more difficult, and in many of its phases has already passed 
beyond the compass of the uneducated. 

We are gradually learning, too, that it does not pay to 
try to hold individuals either within or without the bonds 
of industrial life, but that it is the best public policy to 
leave nature alone in this respect and let the individual 
decide his own destiny after a fair opportunity for choice 
of occupation. 

With a feeling of confidence established at these points, 
the demand for industrial education as such is strongly 
felt and is now becoming surprisingly general, so general 
as to amount to a demand that must be reckoned with, 
and that at once. This demand takes one or the other of 
two forms : either that industrial schools shall be more 
generally established, or else that industrial courses shall 
be added to the curricula of existing schools. Which one of 
these two demands to recognize is the most difficult of all 
questions for educators to solve, because in its solution we 
must look, not so much to the present situation as to future 
conditions and the ultimate consequences of the plan that 
finally shall be adopted. 

With the rise of industrial education new meaning has 
been given to industry and new dignity to that kind of 
labor which is a necessary part of a logical plan looking to the 
accomplishment of definite ends, all of which adds to the 
significance of this form of education and still further 
augments the demand, until our whole scheme of education 
is on the point of revision. 

Some good people, conservative to a fault, look upon 
these educational innovations with extreme disapproval, 
marking, as they believe, the passing of old-time high 



INTRODUCTION 7 

standards of the educated man. Others, noting the im- 
mediate and direct value of technical instruction, are ready 
to jettison the ship and cast overboard as useless junk not 
only every ancient language because it is "dead," but any 
and every other subject that does not clearly and directly 
contribute to utilitarian ends, on the ground that it is not 
practical. As the one side pursues its educational ideals, 
oblivious that men are beings of flesh and blood to be fed, 
clothed, and housed, so the other forgets that the chief end 
of man is not merely to meet his physical necessities. 
Both sides are likely to consider only the present good of 
the individual and overlook the ultimate effect of an educa- 
tional system upon the community as a whole. 

Where, now, between these two extremes shall we find 
the golden mean, by observing which we shall have a new 
philosophy of education adequate to minister to all the 
needs of man ? What is the fountain at which all may 
drink freely, to the advantage not only of the individual 
but of the race ? To answer this question safely will 
require the keenest insight into present conditions and the 
most prophetic vision as to future consequences of what- 
ever policy shall be adopted. 

The following pages are offered as some slight contri- 
bution to the thought that must be bestowed upon the 
matter before the problem of universal education shall be 
so solved as to serve fairly and safely both the five and the 
ninety-five per cent. 



PART I 



CHAPTER I 
EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY » 

It is dangerous to attempt to educate a live boy 
with no reference to the vocational. 

The first general principle to be recognized is this : 
That industrial education cannot be considered by itself 
alone any more than industrial people can live alone. It 
is at best but part of a general scheme of education that 
aims at a higher efficiency of all classes of people, and it 
is in this light that industrial education should be studied 
and its problems solved. 

The most significant educational fact to-day is that men 
of all classes have come to look upon education as a thing 
that will better their condition ; and they mean by that, first 
of all, something to make their labor more effective and 
more profitable ; and second, they mean something that 
will enable them to live fuller lives. They have no very 
clear idea of the methods for bringing it all about, nor have 
they any very good means of impressing their views and 
desires upon us at educational conventions ; but to better 
their condition through education is the abiding faith and 
purpose of all men everywhere, and they will persist until 
it is realized. 

The ruling passion of the race to-day is for education ; 
and colleges and schools of all sorts, both public and private, 

iThis chapter covers the general line of thought developed by the author in an address at 
the dedication of the new agricultural building at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 
May zZ, 1909. 

II 



12 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

day classes and night classes, winter and summer, are filled 
to overflowing. The only educational institution that is 
being deserted is the old-time district school, and that is 
faihng only where it is unable to satisfy the new demands, 
and where this occurs its lineal successor is the public high 
school, which is everywhere becoming the favorite agency 
of modern education of the masses in America. 

The training of the young for the duties of life is no 
longer left to the charity of the church nor to private endow- 
ment, however munificent. We do not ask a man to pay 
the expense of his own education, and we no longer require 
the parent to pay for the schooling of his child. We have 
come to recognize that in the last analysis the child belongs 
to the community, and public welfare requires that he be 
educated. So we have the policy of universal education 
well established among us and the largest item of public as 
well as of private expense is for schools. 

Now this is not sentiment, it is business ; it is not charity, 
it is statesmanship. We propose to maintain all sorts of 
education for all sorts of people, and to keep them in school 
as long as we can — so far have we gone already in this 
worship of the idol of our day and time. 

Yes, truly the ruling passion of the race is for education. 
Individuals would amass wealth ; individuals would exert 
influence and power ; individuals would live lives of luxury 
and ease, but the common purpose of the masses of men 
from all the walks of life is a set determination to acquire 
knowledge. Daughters of washerwomen graduate from 
the high school, and ditchers' sons go to college — not by 
ones and twos, but literally by hundreds and thousands, 
and if the ruling passion fails in individual cases, we have a 
law that puts the child into school, willy-7iilly, on the ground 
that to this extent, at least, he is public property. 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 13 

Now what is to be the consequence of all this ? What 
will the daughter of the washerwoman do after she has 
graduated from the high school ? Will she take her mother's 
place at the tub ? What think you ? If not, how will 
the washing be done ? and was her schooling a blessing or 
a curse to the community ? — because the tub must stay ; and 
if she does take her place at the tub, was her schooling a 
blessing or a curse to her ? Will the ditcher's son inherit 
the father's spade ? and if not, how will ditches be dug if all 
men are to be educated ? How will the world's work get 
done if education takes men and women out of useful and 
needful occupations and makes them over vi\\.o pseiido ladies 
and gentlemen of leisure ? How, too, will their own bills 
be paid except they labor as men have always labored ? 
It is idle to say that a portion of the race should be left 
ignorant that they may perform the undesirable though 
necessary labor. The "portion" objects, and what are we 
going to do about it? Now these are disagreeable ques- 
tions, and we would rather not be forced to answer them ; 
but they are fundamental, and will soon begin to answer 
themselves in some fashion under our system of education, 
which is rapidly becoming universal. 

We are now engaged in the most stupendous educational, 
social, and economic experiment the world has ever under- 
taken — the experiment of universal education ; and whether 
in the end universal education shall prove a blessing or a 
curse to us will depend entirely upon our skill in handling 
the issues it has raised for our solution. We have entered 
too far upon this experiment ever to retire from it, even if 
we desired to do so, which we do not ; and if the outcome 
is to be safety and not anarchy, and if it is all to result in 
further development of the race and not in retrogression, 
then a few fundamentals must soon be clearly recognized 



14 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

and brought into and made a part of our educational ideals, 
policies, and methods. 

Firsts if we are to have universal education, it must 
contain a large element of the vocational, because all the 
needful activities must be maintained in the educated state 
as heretofore. The race cannot progress any more in the 
future than in the past except by the expenditure of large 
amounts of human energy. This being so, education can- 
not be looked upon as an avenue to a life of ease, or as a 
means of giving one man an advantage over another, 
whereby he may exist upon the fruit of that other's labor 
and the sweat of that other's brow. It might do for a 
few ; it cannot do for the mass, whose efficiency must be 
increased and not decreased by education ; because in the 
last analysis education is a public as well as a personal 
matter, and the interests of the state require that the ratio 
of individual efficiency in all lines shall be constantly 
increased. 

Second^ within the limits of needful activities one occu- 
pation is as important as another, and a system of uni- 
versal education must enrich them all, or the end will be 
disastrous. We need to change our views concerning 
what have been regarded as menial employments. In the 
millennium no woman will make her living over the wash- 
tub, nor will she sing the song of the shirt day and night 
forever ; but neither will education and elevation free her, 
or any one else, from a fair share of the drudgery of life, 
because the needful things must still be done. Nor must 
we fail to remind ourselves that not all the labor of the 
world is at the washtub, or at the bottom of the ditch, 
because success in any calling is the price of unremitting 
and exhausting toil, against which education is no insur- 
ance whatever. It can only promise that faithful labor 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 15 

shall have its adequate and sure reward. And that is 
enough, for no man has a right to ask that he be freed 
from labor on this earth ; he can only pray to be relieved 
from the burden of aimless and fruitless drudgery — which 
is the blessed assurance of education. 

While education is no relief from labor, or even drudg- 
ery, it ought, however, to lessen the totality of drudgery by 
the further utilization of mechanical energy and the more 
economic and intelligent direction of human effort. Edu- 
cation will never fully justify itself until this shall have 
been accomplished and the human machine be liberated 
from the last form of slavery — the drudgery that is born 
of ignorance. 

No man, then, educated or uneducated, has a right to be 
useless. Most men will continue to earn and ought to 
earn, in one way or another, the funds to pay their bills, 
and in this natural way will the world's work get done in 
the future as in the past. The education of all men, there- 
fore, is, or should be, in a broad sense vocational, and the 
so-called learned professions are but other names for devel- 
oped industries. In this broad sense every useful activity 
is included, from farming to music and painting, poetry 
and sculpture ; from engineering to medicine and law, 
philosophy and theology ; as wide and as varied as the ac- 
tivities and capacities of the human race — so wide and so 
varied must our education be if it is to be universal and be 
safe. 

Measured by this standard, farming has the same claims 
upon education as have language and literature, but no 
more ; for both are useful, or may be, though in different 
ways. Which is more useful we cannot tell any more than 
we can tell whether food or religion is the more essential 
to human life j or whether art or industry contributes most 



l6 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

to its fullest development. We only know that all things 
within the range of human capacity are useful, and that 
education may, if it will, enrich them all. 

Now this demand is right, for, unless universal education 
can be so administered as not greatly to disturb the rela- 
tions of needful activities, it will prove in the end a curse 
instead of a blessing, and it is the business of educators 
now soberly to consider the consequences of headlong poli- 
cies, however promising in direct results, if they do not 
reckon with the inevitable outcome. 

Third, in the working out of these plans such policies 
and methods must be observed as shall prevent social 
cleavage along vocational Hues. Unless we can do this, 
democracy will, in the end, fail. We cannot go on with 
one half of the people educated and the other half igno- 
rant, any more than we could live with one half free and 
the other half slave. No more can we live with one half 
educated to one set of ideals and the other half to an- 
other. If we attempt it, we shall have, in due time, not 
civilization — but a tug of war between highly educated 
but mutually destructive human energies. The only safety 
for us now is in the education of all classes to common 
ideals of individual efficiency and public service along 
needful lines and with common standards of citizenship. 
To this end the individual must have training, both voca- 
tional and humanistic, and it is better if he does not know 
just when or how he is getting either the one or the other. 

Fourth, remembering that what is one man's vocation is 
another's avocation, and that what is technical and profes- 
sional to one is humanistic to another ; remembering that 
all study is educational and that utility does not lessen its 
value ; remembering, too, that much of our education comes 
from association and that the best of it comes in no other 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 17 

way — remembering all these and many other considera- 
tions well known to the thinking man, we must agree that 
in a system of universal edzication the best results will al- 
ways follow when as many subjects as possible and as m^any 
vocations as may be are taught together in the same school, 
under the same management and to the same body of m,en. 
In no other way can a perfectly homogeneous population 
be secured. In no other way can universal efficiency be so 
closely combined with good citizenship. In no other way 
can activity and learning be so intimately united. In no 
other way can morals and good government be so safely 
intrusted to a free people. 

As I see it, the greatest hindrance to the natural evolu- 
tion of a single system of schools adapted to the education 
of all classes of our people is academic tradition which 
needs substantial modification in a number of important 
particulars. 

The truth is, there is no such thing as a " general edu- 
cation," except one that fits for nothing in particular, leav- 
ing the possessor stranded without occupation or other 
field for the exercise of his trained activities. In so far as 
this type of general education exists among us, the quicker 
we abolish it the better. For example, it has been fash- 
ionable to speak of the courses in the arts and sciences as 
"general," "non-technical," or "liberal," using the terms 
synonymously, and as opposed to the technical or profes- 
sional. 

Now this is inaccurate and leads to much confusion of 
mind. Courses in the arts and sciences are not by nature 
general and non-technical, because an examination of the 
facts will discover that most of the students taking those 
courses in colleges are taking them for professional 
purposes in preparation for definite careers, generally 



l8 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

teaching ; possibly banking, railroad administration, or the 
business of an analytical or manufacturing chemist or some 
other gainful occupation. That is to say, the courses in 
the arts and sciences are mostly taken as professional or 
vocational courses the same as are those in engineering 
and agriculture. 

The best evidence of this erroneous use of terms is that 
those who make most of the distinction between the tech- 
nical and the non-technical courses ; those who talk most 
about the latter being liberal as distinct from the former ; 
those who outcry loudest against commercializing educa- 
tion are teachers themselves, who are earning money 
like farmers. Now by what rule do we adjudge that farm- 
ing is a calling and teaching a profession ? that engineer- 
ing is industrial and journalism liberal .'' that courses fitting 
for farming are technical and narrow, and those fitting for 
teaching or making chemical determinations are general 
and liberal ? The truth is they are all alike vocational ; 
they are all professional ; they all open avenues whereby 
men and women earn money to pay their bills, and ninety- 
nine out of a hundred of those who are good for anything 
in any and all these courses are taking them for the 
same purpose, viz. to afford a congenial field of activity 
whereby the individual may become a worthy and self-sus- 
taining member of society. 

The truth is that the distinction between the technical 
and the non-technical, the professional and the non -pro- 
fessional, the narrow and the liberal, does not inhere in 
courses of study leading to graduation, for the same sub- 
ject may be either the one or the other according to the 
point of view of the student and the purpose for which it 
is taken. For example, chemistry per se is neither techni- 
cal nor non-technical, narrow nor liberal. It is a great 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 19 

field of science. As explored and studied by an agricul- 
tural student, or by one who proposes to make his living 
as an analytical or a manufacturing chemist — to them it 
is a technical subject, while to the student of literature 
it becomes a non-technical and therefore a liberal subject, 
because it liberalizes him and broadens his outlook upon 
the world and helps to connect him with the farmer and 
manufacturing chemist. To the prospective teacher it 
becomes technical or non-technical ; vocational or non- 
ivocational, according as he proposes or does not propose 
to teach it. To the farmer, chemistry is a technical sub- 
ject, and literature and history non-technical, and therefore 
liberal. To the teacher of history, conditions would be 
reversed. 

Another academic reform is to get over our horror of 
the vocational. The old-Hne courses were as distinctly 
vocational to the learned professions as are the newer 
courses to the industrial occupations. The services of 
education to the industries of life and the ordinary oc- 
cupations of men have been so recent that final adjust- 
ments are not yet made. We are only gradually beginning 
to learn that every useful man, educated or uneducated, 
has a calling and that the line between the technical and 
the non-technical, between the narrow and the liberal, runs 
across individuals, not between them. Every properly edu- 
cated man is trained both vocationally and liberally, but one 
vocation is not necessarily more liberal than another ex- 
cept as the practitioner makes it so. To succeed in any 
calling requires the possession of a body of specific knowl- 
edge relating directly to that calling, mostly useless profes- 
sionally to one of another calling, but far from useless as a 
liberalizer. 

Every man, to be efficient, needs the vocational ; to be 



4^ 



20 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

happy and safe he needs the other. John Bessmer was a 
barber and made his Hving by his scissors, but meteorology 
was his avocation. He was the best barber I ever knew, 
but he talked most about meteorology. The ditcher will 
not ditch all his waking hours. What will he think about 
when he is awake and not in the ditch ? Then is when his 
avocation, the liberal part of his education, is his comfort 
and our safety, for the mind is an unruly member, and if 
^ the man has no training beyond his vocation, his intellect 
is at sea, without chart, compass, or rudder, and the human 
mind adrift is a dangerous engine of destruction. 

It is well that we who are bent most upon industrial 
training and development do not forget these considera- 
tions, and in our enthusiasm for technical instruction we 
see to it also that every individual has a fair share of the 
liberal as well, for the chief distinction of the educated 
man is, after all, his ability to view the world from a stand- 
point broader than his own surroundings. 

Another relic of academic ancient history that ought to 
be eliminated is that habit of thought which runs in the 
form of set courses of study four years long. This habit 
of thought has stood in the way of the proper and ade- 
quate development of agriculture in our colleges, and it is 
now standing in the way of high-school differentiation and 
the development of industrial courses therein. 

For example, it has been assumed without discussion 
that a student desiring instruction in agriculture must enter 
upon a set course for four years, and that unless he gradu- 
ated he had somehow failed, or the course was too long. 
It never seemed to occur to our educational fathers and 
grandfathers that perhaps the course was not adapted to 
his needs any more than it seems to occur to some of our 
contemporaries that men go to school to study subjects^ not 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 21 

set courses^ and that the benefits of our instruction are by 
no means confined to those who graduate. 

There is nothing sacred about four years, or about a 
particular association of subjects. We must get over our 
fetish worship of what we call a *' course of study " and 
bestow our attention upon " courses of instruction." Our 
somewhat uniform failure to do this has been responsible 
for much special and unnecessary limitation in the subject 
of agriculture. Let me illustrate : A good friend some 
months ago asked me this question : " Why do you not 
have a two-years course in agriculture in the University 
of Illinois .? " I replied by asking, "Tell me first why do 
you have one in your university } " He replied, " Because 
many young men cannot, or will not stay, for a four-years 
course." And I said, " Then of course you have also two- 
year courses in the arts and sciences, and in engineering } " 
And he said with an elevation of the eyebrows, very signifi- 
cant, " No, of course not." Then I said, " Why not .? Do 
all or most of your students in the other colleges remain 
and complete four-year courses .'* " He had to answer, 
" No, not a third of them." I think I had answered his 
question, but to make sure I said, "When the other col- 
leges of the University of Illinois find it necessary or desir- 
able to put in two-year courses because not more than one 
student in three or four stays to graduate, then I suppose 
we shall do the same; but until then I think we shall 
continue to teach subjects to those who come, and bestow 
honors on those who have earned the usual amount of 
credit." Here is a good illustration of our futile efforts 
to hammer a new subject into line with ancient academic 
custom, as if graduation from something, even a two-years 
course, were the chief end of the schooling process. 

This same old habit of thought is the bane of the high 



22 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

schools to-day in their effort to serve the people. Many 
of them consider the limit reached when a four-years 
course is offered, made up largely out of old-line subjects 
with little or no reference to local needs, and when we talk 
about instruction in vocational subjects they remind us that 
the "course is full." This mistaken attitude on the part 
of too many high school men will do more than all other 
causes combined to force upon us a multitude of separate 
technical schools and destroy the opportunity of the high 
schools forever, because men are as firmly bent on voca- 
tional education of a secondary grade to-day as their fathers 
were bent on industrial education of collegiate grade half 
a century ago. The same forces are at work in high 
schools now as were at work among colleges then, and the 
issue will be the same. Either the high schools will ex- 
pand and teach the vocational, or other schools will be 
established that will do it. 

One good friend whom I greatly honor, because he is many 
years my senior, and many degrees my superior in every 
sense, writing me on this point, said in substance: "Your 
idea that all subjects needful to the life of the community 
should be taught in the same school is fine in theory, but 
how are you going to get it all into the course, and what 
shall be left out? " Aye, there's the rub ! How get it into 
the course and what shall be left out f How this instinctive 
attitude of mind clings to us academic people ! It is not 
much found except among professional educators, and with 
them it is one of the relics of academic ancient history, 
dating back to the time when the college provided a set 
course for all students and which, when full, wa.sfullin the 
same sense that the jug is full. 

Recentty the colleges have learned the lesson of the tre- 
mendous complexity of modern demands, and they are be- 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 23 

ginning to realize something of the depth and breadth of the 
meaning of universal education ; at least that it means the 
education of many men for many things and by means of 
various materials and methods. This involves many courses 
in one school. It requires that colleges teach subjects rather 
than set courses ; and nothing is full so long as any branch 
of knowledge and activity remains undeveloped and men 
and money hold out. The colleges have learned this ; it 
is also the lesson for the secondary schools ; indeed, in a 
very large sense the land-grant university is the model for 
the public high school. 

Our children look to the schools to fit them for the 
many duties of life. Let them not be disappointed. To 
this end we must construct such educational policies and 
employ such materials and methods as shall make the 
school a true picture of life outside in all its essential ac- 
tivities. To accomplish this we must introduce vocational 
studies freely, not for their pedagogic influence but for 
their own sake and for the professional skill and creative 
energy they will give the learner. We must do this, too, 
without excluding the non-professional either from the 
school or from the individual. 

Take a specific instance outside of agriculture, but one 
which is typical of thousands of cases. There are many 
good families whose daughters feel the need of earning some 
little money during years of young womanhood between 
the school age and matrimony. They are good typical 
American girls, worthy the love and the service of any man, 
and sometime the hero will come. In the meantime, what ? 

We will suppose that the girl in question looks with 
favor upon stenography and typewriting as a congenial 
employment. Now I put the question flatly, remembering 
there are many like her in the same community, — shall 



24 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

the high school put in courses of typewriting and stenogra- 
phy which she may take in connection with her humanistic 
studies and her domestic science which she will one day 
need ? — for this typical girl is, or should be, a prospective 
wife and mother. Will the school do this ? or will it force 
her to leave her high school in order to get elsewhere 
this vocational training which she thinks she must have, 
because of temporary needs, and which the high school 
will not give her lest it should be suspected of commercial- 
izing education ? 

I am thankful that many high schools are already put- 
ting in vocational courses. May their numbers increase. 
It is far better to hold this girl in the high school and teach 
her also the things she will one day need much more than 
she will then need her stenography and typewriting, — it is 
better for her and it is better for the community than it is 
to force her, in early years and under the exigency of im- 
mediate needs, to abandon the greater for the less. Yes, it 
is better to take stenography and typewriting, telegraphy 
and bookkeeping into the high school than it is to drive 
our girls out of it even into the night schools. A proper 
policy at this point wall save to American wifehood and 
American homes thousands of bachelor maids and factory 
girls, and do more to reduce the ratio of divorce than any 
other civilizing force with which we hold acquaintance. 

What is true of many girls is doubly true of most boys. 
If they are good for anything, the impulse to be doing 
something definite takes hold of them early, and the only 
way to keep a live boy in school or to make him good for 
anything after he leaves it is to be certain that some portion 
of his curriculum relates directly to some form of business 
activity outside. It is dangerous to attempt to educate a live 
boy with no reference to the vocational. 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 25 

The trouble has been in the past, and is yet, that our 
courses of instruction have been too few. We have not 
sufficiently distinguished between what a single individual 
could take and what the community as a whole ought to 
know. Accordingly, men seeking education have found 
much of the subject-matter and of the method grossly un- 
suited to the uses they hoped to make of it, and have either 
left the school, sacrificing their broader opportunity, or 
have stayed to the sacrifice of their efficiency. 

The universities have been first to recognize this fact and 
to meet it. With the best of them there is no thought of 
a set course which every individual must take, but rather 
the aim is to offer instruction in as many as possible of 
the branches of knowledge that interest and profit men. 
The result is that in these institutions few men are taking 
courses with a fixed sequence, but each is after the instruc- 
tion which will best fit his needs, and often two men take 
the same subject side by side with a very different purpose 
and from a very different point of view. 

Now the efficiency of modern university education, espe- 
cially along new lines, is becoming notable, and institutions 
conducted upon this plan are overrun with students seeking 
definite instruction for definite purposes, all of which indi- 
cates the educational policy that best meets the needs of 
the people. Here is the cue to the general plan that 
should characterize the high schools, upon which educators 
ought to bestow some degree of special attention, because 
it is in the secondary schools and not in the colleges that 
the American people will mostly be educated. 

A third particular in which we need academic reforma- 
tion is this: Not only college courses, but high school 
courses, as well, are planned and conducted almost solely 
in the interest of the few who graduate, with but little ref- 



26 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

erence to the masses who drop by the wayside. If our 
system of education is to achieve the highest results, it 
must recognize the natural difference in men, both qualita- 
tively and quantitatively, and while it trains the brightest 
and best for the positions of most responsibility and there- 
fore of honor, it must so shape its policy that those who 
for any reason cannot, or do not, remain to the limit of time, 
or whose academic ability is mediocre shall drop naturally 
into useful places for which their little schooling has some- 
what definitely prepared them. Thus will our human 
flotsam and jetsam be lessened, and thus shall we become 
more homogeneous as a people. Thus too shall we be 
consistent, for does not our education aim to be universal ? 

Our high schools, or rather their constituency, are suf- 
fering cruelly at this point to-day. The chief object in too 
many ambitious schools is to get on the accredited list of 
as many universities as possible, graduate as many students 
as may be, and get them into college. So intense is this 
purpose that in too many instances the course of study and 
the methods of work are inadvertently but largely shaped 
in the interest of those who are to graduate, though we 
know only too well that their ratio is small, and that of 
those who go to college it is still smaller. 

It is time the high schools served the interests of their 
community first of all ; and if they will do that thoroughly, 
the colleges will manage to connect with them on some 
terms mutually satisfactory. If that is impossible, then let 
the high school faithfully discharge its natural functions to 
the community that gives it life and support, and leave 
adjustments to the universities. The few who go beyond 
the high school will be abundantly able to take care of 
themselves if only their training has been thorough^ and 
they have learned habits of efficiency. I protest against 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 27 

the reduction of the American high school to the basis of 
a college preparatory school, unless it is first built upon 
what is a rational education for the masses of men. We 
have no right to reduce, impoverish, or distort the educa- 
tional opportunity of the great mass of people who depend, 
upon the high school for their only education, in the 
interest of the few who go to college. 

We are nearing the time when for various reasons we shall 
revolutionize our secondary education as we have already 
revolutionized our college standards. We shall offer many 
courses of instruction in many subjects, some vocational, 
others not ; some vocational to certain students, not so to 
others, and all in the same school. We shall not be on 
sound ground in this matter until things are so fixed that 
when a boy or a girl comes into contact with our school 
system at any point, even for a short time, he or she will 
at once and of necessity strike something vocational and 
also something not vocational ; to the end that, however 
soon the student leaves the system, he will carry out into 
life at least something which will make him more efficient 
at some point, and also more cultivated, because the schools 
have taught him something of actual life, not only in the 
abstract but in its application. 

The greatest trouble with our educational system to-day 
is that it is laid out too much on the plan of a trunk line 
railroad without side switches or way stations, but with 
splendid terminal facilities, so that we send the educational 
trains thundering over the country, quite oblivious of the 
population except to take on passengers, and these we take 
on much as the fast train takes mail bags from the hook. 
We do our utmost to keep them aboard, to the end, and we 
work so exclusively for this purpose that those who leave us 
are fitted for no special calling, and drop out for no special 



28 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

purpose, but roll off like chunks of coal by the wayside — 
largely a matter of luck as to what becomes of them. 
I would reconstruct the policy of the system by making all 
trains local, both to take on and leave off passengers ; and 
I would pay much attention to the sidings, and the depots, 
and their surroundings at the way stations, to the end that 
those who do not complete the journey may find congenial 
surroundings and useful employment in some calling along 
the line. I mean by this that while vocation should be 
neither the end nor the means of the educational process, 
yet it should be its inseparable concomitant. This is 
education for efficiency and service, whether it ever earns 
an academic degree or not. 

We need not fear real education for real efficiency, but we 
may well tremble when we see a whole people gorging 
themselves with a mass of knowledge that has no applica- 
tion to the lives they are to live, for this will breed in the 
end dissatisfaction and anarchy. The best illustration of 
this educational short-sightedness is the fondness of many 
a classically educated colored brother for Latin, Greek, and 
Hebrew, not so much for what they can do for him, or help 
to do for himself or others, as because the acquisition of 
language is a pleasant exercise and its possession a satisfy- 
ing novelty. Fortunately Booker Washington and Tus- 
keegee are in the land, but unfortunately our educational 
blunders are not limited to the colored race. It is a notable 
and perhaps significant fact that a very large proportion 
of the tramps of the country have had the advantages 
of our schools. 

Another point at which our minds are in danger of wan- 
dering far afield is in regard to the natural function of the 
secondary school. The American high school is a new 
institution, and like all new institutions it lacks ideals and 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 29 

methods. It has displaced, in the West at least, the old- 
time academy whose function it was to fit for college. 
The high school, lacking models, has followed very largely 
and quite naturally the plan of the academy whose mantle 
it has inherited. In this it has erred. The modern high 
school is not the lineal descendant of the old-time academy y 
and its primary function is not to fit for college. It is a 
new institution^ and its function is to educate its natural 
and local constitue?icy for the duties of life. It is as thor- 
oughly a public institution as is the state university ^ and it 
should serve its community in the same way arid with the 
same spirit that the university serves the larger and more 
complex unit. 

It is the first business of the high schools to serve the 
public needs directly through the masses of men and 
women who constitute their natural constituency, not in- 
directly through the colleges. Their service to education 
and to civilization is primary, fundamental, and direct, not 
secondary and preparatory. Nor in saying this do I re- 
flect upon the great work of our institutions of highest 
learning ; far from it. No man can exceed me in admira- 
tion of the supreme service of the colleges and the uni- 
versities of the country, but that supreme service must 
be rendered without overshadowing, distorting, or injuring 
that other service, which, after all, is more direct, reaches 
a larger number, and without which the influences of the 
colleges and universities will be largely dissipated and lost. 

If the existing high schools will earnestly address them- 
selves to this great duty, they will become, next to the 
church, the most powerful educating and elevating agen- 
cies of our civilization; but if they do not, then as sure as 
time passes another system of schools will arise that will 
do it, and the time will not be long hence until they will 



30 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

divide the field with technical schools and play a losing 
game of chance with them. The first independent schools 
will be trade schools in the cities and agricultural schools 
in the country, and this lead will be followed by others 
until we shall have a whole system of vocational schools 
of all conceivable sorts; and the high schools will be 
stripped, first of one opportunity to serve their constitu- 
ency and then of another, until their usefulness will be 
lessened, if not entirely destroyed in the eyes of the peo- 
ple, who alone can support them, and they will be rele- 
gated to girls' schools and training schools for college 
admission. 

This is no fanciful picture, and I am convinced that 
unless we are quick to read and heed the handwriting on 
the wall to-day the next decade or two will witness the 
permanent decline of the high school under the onslaught 
of the multitude of independent vocational schools that 
will spring up everywhere and which will seem to serve 
well because the service is direct and plainly useful. The 
only great future for the high school is to add vocational 
work, making the separate technical school unnecessary, 
if not impossible. If they will do this, their future and their 
service are assured ; but if the people find it necessary to 
estabhsh another system of secondary education as they did a 
new system of collegiate grade, then they will do it ; but if 
they do, they will certainly insist upon a fair division of the 
revenues, because modern high schools are not private 
institutions as were the old-time colleges; they are in 
every sense of the term public institutions. 

Experience in university circles has shown that the 
separate professional college was necessary in the past 
only because of the indifference to new demands of the 
institutions then existing. As soon however as the universi- 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 31 

ties seriously set about studying the new problem from 
their own standpoint it was found that there was really 
nothing incompatible between the old and the new ideals, 
but rather that it took the two together to make a com- 
plete system of education, and where the two have been 
already joined, — the professional and the cultural, the in- 
dustrial and the humanistic, — there has education flourished 
best in the last decade ; there is the educational impulse 
strongest to-day, and there, if wise counsels prevail, will 
develop in good time the greatest educational strength 
and creative power of this most virile of people ; not only 
along industrial lines, but along artistic and humanistic 
lines as well. 

If the high schools make the most of their opportunity, 
they will develop into a great system capable of training 
the masses of our people not only industrially but for all 
the duties of life, and in a way that can never be equaled 
by any multiple system of separate vocational schools, 
however well established and conducted. One school 
with many courses, not many schools with different 
courses — that is the plan for American secondary educa- 
tion. Such a school would be large enough and strong 
enough to afford an excellent education within walking or 
driving distance of every young person — an ideal not 
attainable by any system of separate schools that can 
ever be established. I have unlimited faith in the final 
development of the high school, and cannot condemn in 
terms too strong a pessimistic or a carping spirit toward 
this new and remarkable system of education at the very 
doors of the people ; and I cannot oppose too strongly any 
and all influences that tend to make its proper evolution 
either impossible or more difficult. 

We must not underrate the importance of the average 



32 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

citizen, either to himself or to the community, for the com- 
mon man with an opportunity is a common man no longer. 
If we would know what a community of common people 
can do when it addresses itself seriously and en masse to a 
single purpose, consider the success of that little German 
village in breeding canaries, marvel upon the achievements 
in the Passion Play at Oberammergau, or even the singing 
of the Messiah in that little Swedish village of Kansas, as 
described in a recent Outlook. 

Remembering what the common man may do, with 
proper ideals and advantages, there is no higher duty now 
resting upon all of us, and especially upon educators, than 
to unite education and activity by the closest possible 
bonds, to prevent on the one hand the acquirement of 
knowledge to no purpose, and on the other the develop- 
ment of operative skill with little knowledge of the true 
relations of things ; to see to it that no individual shall be 
compelled to choose between an education without a voca- 
tion, and a vocation without an education. This supreme 
responsibility rests heavily upon every American commu- 
nity just now, and in our enthusiasm for education that is 
useful it is well if we temper our enthusiasm with judg- 
ment and keep always in mind the fundamentals on which 
all real education must rest. If this be true, it is impera- 
tive that the high school as an educational institution 
should take hold of and care for all the essential activities 
of its community ; and if the clay working or some other 
interest develop into a separate organization with a sepa- 
rate plant, that it still be under the control of the high 
school, as the different colleges of a university are under 
one control, and their policies and aims, though different, 
are yet harmonized into a common purpose of training for 
actual, not apparent, efficiency. 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 



33 



To teach all subjects to all men in the same school — this 
is the great educational, social, and economic opportunity 
of America, where both collegiate and secondary education 
are in the hands of the general public and not of any sect, 
class, or faction. If we throw away this natural advan- 
tage, bought with blood and treasure, or if we neglect to 
make the most of it, we are guilty before the nation and 
the race of a breach of trust second only to the sin of 
treason. 

If we follow precedent blindly and transport that alien 
institution, the European trade school, and transplant it 
into the free soil of America simply because it is tempo- 
rarily easier than to complete the system we have so splen- 
didly begun, then shall we commit an educational blunder 
that is inexcusable, and we shall richly deserve the anathe- 
mas that will be ours from generations yet unborn when 
they come to see the handicap we have laid upon them and 
the natural advantages we have sacrificed. 

I would have it so that the occupation of an American 
citizen may not be known by his dress, his manner, his 
speech, or his prejudices. If we can realize this ideal, it 
will be to our perpetual advantage, for it will insure not 
only our economic independence but our social comfort, 
our racial progress, and our national safety. If all this is 
to come about, we have some thinking to do now, for, as I 
have remarked elsewhere, more depends on what we do 
now, than can depend upon what we or others think and 
say and try to do twenty-five or fifty years from now. 

When the materials for American educational history 
are all gathered, and when time enough has elapsed for its 
various elements to assume their true proportions and per- 
spective, it will be found that the most significant fact in 
the educational movement of our day and time was the 



34 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

agitation that led up to the establishment of the state uni- 
versity. 

In a very large sense the founding of that unique in- 
stitution of learning introduced two new and distinctive 
elements into our philosophy of education, both of which 
bid fair to be permanent, and to control even to the extent 
of revolutionizing our educational ideals. 

The first of these fundamental doctrines was this — that 
no single class of men and no single class of subjects 
should dominate the educational policies of this people ; 
and the second was that in the last analysis higher educa- 
tion is a public and not a personal matter. 

The state university was in some sense a protest against 
the order of things then existing. Colleges were giving 
their exclusive attention to an exceedingly narrow range 
of human knowledge, and conducting courses of study 
that fitted well for theology, medicine, and law, but were 
calculated to unfit for other activities of men that were also 
essential ; so that education served a few occupations at 
the expense of all others ; for no man could find anywhere 
on earth courses of study to fit himself for usefulness out- 
side the so-called learned professions, good and useful in 
themselves, but insufficient for all the needs of a high civi- 
lized people. This being true, the effect of education was not 
to enrich the lives of men generally and to advance civiliza- 
tion uniformly, but rather to draw from all walks of life 
into a few favored occupations, and leave the great outside 
mass of human knowledge undeveloped, neglected, and 
largely inaccessible, and most of the activities of men un- 
touched by the vitalizing energy of learning. 

The protest arose because all classes were not given 
equal opportunity and all activities were not equally bene- 
fited, in which case the public was not well served. Under 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 35 

the old regime agriculture remained undeveloped, and farm- 
ing was common labor. Building and mechanics gener- 
ally were craftsmanship executed mostly by unskilled labor, 
which was bad for the men and the industry, and worse 
for the public whom they served. 

The state universities were established primarily to teach 
the branches of knowledge especially related to the indus- 
tries of life ; but their field has broadened in the doing, 
and their success has shown not only that learning may 
be useful without losing its educative value, but that all 
branches of learning are both useful and educative, and 
thereby worthy of being taught to somebody ; that in the 
interest of the public it is the business of a school as of a 
university to teach more things than any single man may 
desire to know, and that it is the business of our institu- 
tions of learning to reflect in their laboratories and in their 
class rooms the life and essential activities of our civilization 
at least in all its major aspects. 

The other new idea introduced through the state univer- 
sity is that education is first of all a public rather than a 
personal matter. Colleges had long been maintained for 
the convenience of those who desired and were able to pay 
for an education, and those who took these courses did so 
with a view to bettering their condition personally. While 
the campaign for industrial education savored largely of 
personal needs and class equality in educational opportu- 
nity, yet in its working out we have discovered the deeper 
principle ; viz. that the public is not well served until we 
educate freely for all useful activities, to the end that these 
activities shall be in the hands of educated men, under 
whom only will they develop and by which development 
only will our civilization as a whole prosper and progress. 
The ultimate purpose of a great system of education is and 



36 . EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

must be the development of human activities, both indus- 
trial and non-industrial, and our great demand upon the 
individuals that have enjoyed its advantages is service — 
service in something, somewhere ; anything, anywhere. 

The great mass of human happiness will always arise 
out of doing well the common things of life, and the 
happiness of the individual will lie in that creative genius 
which does to-day the same thing it did yesterday, but does 
it better. All else is spice and seasoning to life, and as we 
cannot live on cakes and spices, so the enduring things 
will always be the useful things. There will be no edu- 
cated aristocracy, for education will have a higher purpose 
than to give one man an advantage over another. 

Every man's life is a comedy, a tragedy, or a symphony, 
according as he is educated. It was a great thing when 
the common man first lifted up his head, looked about him 
and said, ** I, too, will be educated." It is our business to see 
to it that that high resolve shall not destroy the race, but 
shall still further bless it. 



CHAPTER II 

INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE 
TO THE HIGH SCHOOL i 

"We have learned to look to our schools and to ask, in the 
name of charity as well as of education, whether they are training 
for that efBciency which will prevent poverty." — Edward T. Devine, 
in the Atlantic Monthly, December, 1908. 

The subject of industrial education is so broad and the 
interests concerned are so vast and so varied that no single 
writer can hope to bring to its discussion that complete 
knowledge which is necessary to the rational and final so- 
lution of a difficult problem. 

I cannot and do not pretend, therefore, to speak with 
authority, so that what I shall say is to be regarded as a 
contribution to our deliberations, arising out of a some- 
what intimate association with a particular class of people 
in their attempt to supply their educational needs in such 
a way as to contribute to, and not detract from, the general 
welfare. 

Again, of the many things that might be said and of the 
many considerations that might be advanced as bearing 
upon so important a subject, it is manifestly impossible to 
do more than to select here a thought and there an illus- 
tration, depending largely upon the happy circumstance 
of accident if the picture drawn be true to life or even 
the reader be enabled to see clearly any picture at all 

1 The substance of an address delivered at the high school conference, University of 
Illinois, November 20, 1908. 

37 



38 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

from the meager outlines that must of necessity be hastily 
drawn. 

It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to define indus- 
trial education, but we all know very well what it means. 
For example, it means education in and for agriculture, 
the mechanic arts, household affairs, and the major indus- 
tries generally, as distinct from education in and for the 
so-called learned professions. It means specialized educa- 
tion in and for the ordinary occupations of men, as distinct 
from the purely mental occupations, and as distinct also 
from mere mental acquisition and training without regard 
to occupation. 

The first step in the solution of this question has been 
taken already in the educational world quite outside of our 
field, and we are greatly relieved and advanced thereby in 
our present considerations. The time has passed when 
the so-called general education is held to be ample for all 
purposes, and even quite outside of industries we have 
highly specialized courses — courses in journalism, courses 
in diplomacy, courses in banking, in accounting, in music, 
in painting — all professional, but all, in the strictest sense, 
non-industrial. 

The need of specialized courses looking to occupations 
outside of the original triumvirate of law, medicine, and 
theology, is, therefore, already well recognized, and it re- 
lieves us mightily, for we can begin at this point and 
confine our discussion to the need for courses looking to 
industrial careers and to the question of how and where 
these courses should be offered. 

This matter of industrial education has been before the 
public a generation and more until now, like a poor rela- 
tion, it is ever with us. Feeble at first but always insistent, 
like Banquo's ghost, it would not down, but it has gathered 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN HIGH SCHOOLS 39 

force and finish with the years, until to-day it is about the 
most robust educational problem before us as well as one 
of the most important, because of the far-reaching conse- 
quences of whatever policies may be adopted for its solution. 

Some of the methods that have been proposed are so 
grossly inadequate on the one hand and so oblivious of 
racial integrity and the highest public good upon the other 
as to force us to the conclusion that the advocates are not 
fully advised of all the forces that have brought this ques- 
tion to the front, and consequently their solutions are not 
solutions, but only temporizing substitutes. Let us not err 
at least in this direction. Let us, therefore, at the outset 
inquire somewhat carefully into the conditions that have 
brought the problem before us. 

Now the demand for industrial education is not a piece 
of academic evolution ; that is to say, it did not originate 
in the schools. It arose as one of the demands of the 
masses of men for better life and opportunity. Its nature, 
as well as its relation to other forms of education, can best 
be understood in connection with the conditions of its evo- 
lution. Therefore, at the risk of seeming to wander far 
afield, let us at this point refresh our memories a bit upon 
our social and educational history and development. 

Our modern educational system is the product of com- 
paratively recent conditions. It is not the lineal descend- 
ant of Greece or of Rome, of Egypt or of Babylonia. It 
was born in the Middle Ages, nourished in the cloister, 
grew with Magna Charta, and is coming to its fruitage 
now. 

In those dark days, when might was right, the common 
man was counted with his cattle as part of the spoil and 
the property of the latest conqueror. When war blotted 
out industry, no man could succeed except upon the king's 



!<■ 




40 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

favor, and when the king declared, ** The state, it is I," it 
was only the monk in the cloister that dared dispute him. 
It is exceedingly significant for our purpose that it was in 
these days — not so very long ago as time is measured by 
racial history — when kings could neither read nor write 
but counted learning as f ooUshness, — it was in these days 
that Magna Charta granted to monk and to freeman alike 
the blessings of legal rights and civil liberty. 

This was the first recognition of the rights of the com- 
mon man since the days of Greece and Rome. It made 
the evolution of a people possible, nay inevitable, and there 
and then was laid the foundation for the conditions that 
have given rise to the problems of industrial education in 
our own day. 

It was then that the lamp of learning, like the lamp 
of liberty, flickered only in the cloister, and education, like 
religion, meant separation from the world, which was re- 
garded, properly I am convinced, as wholly given over to 
the flesh and the devil. Under conditions such as these, 
meditation was the only occupation of the thoughtful man, 
religion was his only consolation, and the only use for 
learning was in the reading of the Scriptures. What won- 
der that it has taken all these years afterward to make our 
religion really useful; what wonder, too, that in our own 
day we are having the trouble of our Hves in the endeavor 
to make of learning not only a consolation and an inspira- 
tion, but a useful thing as well ! 

With the revival of learning, humanity flourished. The 
earned professions developed, and men prospered and 
grew happy. Property became secure, and the fruits of 
industry belonged to the one who earned them. For the 
first time in the modern world, life to the common man 
promised to be worth the living. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN HIGH SCHOOLS 41 

It was inevitable now that this common man should 
begin to think, and as he thought, become ambitious. The 
rise of individuals had proved him to be made of the same 
stuff as other men, and he was conscious of his possibilities. 
He determined to avail himself of the opportunities of 
life and, noting the advantages of education to other men 
and their conditions, he resolved to become educated 
himself. 

Very natural was all this. The common man, like others, 
would better his conditions if he could, and he came rightly 
to conclude that the place and the way of beginning was 
to possess himself of a fair share of the world's knowl- 
edge, at least so far as it applied to his condition. His 
resolve, therefore, to be educated, was as natural as life ; 
indeed, it was the inevitable consequence of liberty to a 
capable race. 

The resolve of the common man to secure the blessings 
and the graces of learning was not announced formally at 
any great national or international gathering. It was not 
the result of the labors of any committee on resolutions. 
It was the result of a deep-seated conviction, born silently 
but simultaneously in the hearts of thousands upon thou- 
sands of a free and capable people. And it has come on 
silently, but relentlessly as the tide, till now it is well upon 
us ; and here lies our problem. 

This resolve of the common man to be educated — what 
was it } What did it mean ? Whatever else it meant and 
is meaning, it means universal education. If the common 
man had been contented to do without learning, and we 
had all been willing to let him, our educational problems 
in these days would have been comparatively simple. 

We should have gone on as before, fitting men for the 
learned professions only. I imagine, however, even then, 



42 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

as learning grew and the world's stock of knowledge ac- 
cumulated, we should still have seen substantial additions 
to these so-called learned professions, and that by this road, 
if by no other, through the very exigency of public need, 
we should one day come to develop a scientific agricul- 
ture, a scientific engineering, a scientific system of house- 
hold management, and so would the number and the 
range of learned occupations develop in good time as 
the very reflex of the wealth of human knowledge. 

But this common man of ours has vastly hastened matters 
by his hitherto unheard-of and rather sudden resolve to be 
educated, thus forcing upon us without much warning and 
with little to guide us, the stupendous problem of universal 
education, for that is what our problem really is. 

Now, universal education is something more than admit- 
ting everybody to the privileges of the schools. It did not 
take this common man long to find out that the learning of 
the cloister was not fitted to his necessities, and he learned, 
also, in good time, that the subject-matter and the spirit of 
the courses designed for theology, law, and medicine, 
though admirably adapted to the needs of the people they 
were designed to serve, failed utterly to serve the common 
man and his needs, save only when he desired to escape 
into one of the learned professions. 

This for a time worked well, and many men did better 
their condition by escaping to these professions. But 
presently was discovered what we should all along have 
known ; viz. that a course of study has a powerful influence 
not only over the future career of a boy, but ultimately 
over the destiny of occupations. 

Thus it came about that individuals that went to the 
schools out of the common walks of life did not return. 
And thus it came about that the learned professions were 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN HIGH SCHOOLS 43 

overloaded with much material unsuited to their needs ; that 
many educated men failed in lines of business to which by 
nature they were not adapted ; that many products of the 
schools halted at the threshold and did nothing in particular. 
Thus it came about that reproach was laid upon education, 
and, what was worse than all else, the common occupations 
were not themselves touched by the advantages of learning. 
Thus it came about that our first attempts at universal 
education were gigantic failures, because we ignorantly 
assumed that a form of education that was good for one 
man and his peculiar needs was good enough for all men, 
and if not directly adapted to their needs, they themselves 
could make the application later on. 

It is not strange, with this experience running over many 
years and affecting and disappointing thousands of people, 
that many good men held universal education to be a failure 
and wholly undesirable in theory, as tending to industrial 
disturbance and to general social unrest. But here again 
the common man — common only because there are so 
many of him, and uncommon because it is his to meet and 
reckon with the everyday issues of life — here again the 
common man saw with a clearer vision than others what 
was the occasion of the failure. He noted not only that 
when a boy went from industrial life into the schools he 
seldom if ever returned, but he noted also that when he did 
return his education was ill adapted to his needs. He noted., 
too, this common man, that this policy was stripping the 
major industries of their brightest and naturally most ambi- 
tious men only, to pile them up where they were not wanted 
or to turn them into cheap clerks, to lead dependent and 
unproductive lives. 

Nor was this the worst. The industries themselves were 
not developing under this regime. When the best men 



44 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

went out and did not return, or if they did return, failed 
to bring into the industry that information and training that 
would still further improve it, then for that industry, knowl- 
edge was unutilized, and education might as well, even 
better, not exist. To this extent, therefore, and for this 
industry universal education was a failure, and more than a 
failure, for it attracted away the ablest and most progressive 
of the young men, leaving only the least ambitious and the 
least capable behind. 

The common man with his practical vision saw all this, 
and with his characteristic directness went straight to the 
root of the difficulty, suggesting a remedy that was at once 
concrete and effective. He said, "As the older courses 
are adapted to the learned prof ession, so will we have other 
courses where matter and method are adapted to the needs 
of the industries and the industrial people," all of which 
was and is yet not only good sense, but good educational, 
social, and economic philosophy. 

This, in its day, was regarded as heresy. As we all 
know, the old-time schools for the most part refused to 
establish such courses, and the establishment of separate 
schools was, under these conditions, a necessity. Now the 
common experience has been that when courses suitable to 
the needs of the special industries have been properly 
formed and properly taught, whether in separate schools 
or in company with other courses, young men have taken 
them in increasing numbers. Moreover, they have returned 
to the industries afterward and succeeded, because they 
have taken back with them not only new and useful knowl- 
edge, whereby the industry is better developed, but besides 
they have taken with them many of the graces of education, 
whereby the people are benefited as well as their industries. 
In this way we have seen a new meaning in universal edu- 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN HIGH SCHOOLS 45 

cation and have taken some advanced lessons in its admin- 
istration through its introduction into the institutions of 
highest learning. 

In this way we have learned that education must be 
somewhat adapted to the ends in view ; that as civilization 
advances and knowledge accumulates there must be many- 
courses for many men, and we have learned, too, that there 
is by nature nothing incompatible between them because 
higher industrial education flourishes nowhere else so well 
as when associated with the old-time courses in the state 
university, that unique and modern association of teaching 
and investigation that is designed to minister to all the 
needs, industrial, social, economic, and artistic, of a rapidly 
advancing civilization. As a result of this experience we 
are all now in favor of industrial education without know- 
ing or caring exactly what it is or precisely how it is to 
be administered. Nobody derides it any longer. The old 
"issues" are dead issues. There is no conflict between 
the classics and the industries, but all thinking men see 
clearly now that whether the education be classical or in- 
dustrial, it is alike a part, and an essential part, of the suc- 
cessful development of a young, strong, and virile race. 

The question now is as to practical methods of pro- 
cedure. There is little dispute as to the nature of courses 
best adapted to industrial ends, though much improvement 
will be made as time passes. Academic standards and 
educational values are being set, and the future of indus- 
trial education is assured, whether regarded from the 
standpoint of the individual or that of the industry. The 
only real question — and' it is gigantic — is whether and 
to what extent industrial courses should be added to our 
existing schools, or whether they should be relegated to 
separate institutions. Upon this point, which is vital to the 



46 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

interests we all represent, and which is after all the only 
present issue, I venture somewhat extended discussion. 

Of one large fact we may rest well assured at the outset ; 
viz. that industrial education is with us to stay. The in- 
dustrial people insist upon it and public needs demand it 
for reasons already mentioned and evident to every keen 
observer. We can, therefore, find a place for it in our 
schools, making it an integral part of our system of uni- 
versal education, or it will make a place for itself and a 
system of its own, which will be the worse for all of us, as 
I have endeavored elsewhere to point out.^ 

Moreover, the crux of the situation lies not with indus- 
trial education, but far back of it in that general realm of 
education for efficiency which is a natural corollary of a 
logical system of universal education. We already have 
abundant proof of the fact that all people cannot be edu- 
cated upon one model, and that to attempt it not only 
greatly disturbs the social and industrial balance, but also 
produces too many failures. 

There is one thing worse and more to be dreaded than 
illiteracy, and that is incompetence, and if there is one 
form of incompetence more hopeless than all others, it is 
that form which arises from bad schooling. All consider- 
ations of public welfare lead to the conclusion that we 
must have a philosophy of education and a method of pro- 
cedure that will meet, not a portion merely, but all the 
needs of a highly civilized race. 

Education is vastly more than a personal matter. We 
have often erred in the past by forgetting this, and we 
have proceeded as if no question were involved beyond 
helping the individuals in our schools to improve their 
personal condition. That is why in the past our school 

1 See chapter on Unity in Education. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN HIGH SCHOOLS 47 

system has greatly disturbed our industrial equilibrium 
and threatened permanently to injure the social state. 

If, as formerly, only a few people and interests were af- 
fected by our system of education, it would matter little to 
the general public what is taught, or how it is taught ; but 
when we embark upon a scheme of universal education as 
we have done, we must have a philosophy of education as 
broad as the activities and the capabilities of the race, 
or else we shall be injured instead of advanced at certain 
points and, to that extent, at least, education prove a curse 
instead of a blessing. 

And so it is that there is a business, a social, a com- 
munity, a racial side as well as a personal side to educa- 
tion, and if we are to have anything like a system of uni- 
versal education, then it must touch and uplift and develop 
all the major activities of the race, as well as train and 
elevate the people in all the walks of life. 

I have in succeeding chapters gone somewhat at length 
into the reasons for preferring that we retain the unity 
and integrity of our educational system by taking into our 
schools not only industrial education, but all other forms 
of educational necessity that are now felt or that may in the 
future arise, to the end that all interests may be well served 
and that, too, in a way not involving influences that tend to 
break up the homogeneity of our people, but above all 
preventing the evolution of an American peasant class. 

This matter has been fully settled in the colleges and the 
universities; it awaits solution only in the secondary schools. 
The institutions of highest learning are freely introducing 
the most highly specialized courses, both vocational and 
non-vocational, industrial and non -industrial, nor do they 
feel that their educational standards suffer thereby. 

Moreover, the strictly vocational courses succeed nowhere 



48 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

else so well as when intimately associated with the non-vo- 
cational. This association is good for all parties. It not 
only adds culture and refinement to the vocational, but it 
adds directness and initiative to the cultural, thus turning 
back to the community a product whose individuals are 
highly schooled in specialized activities and therefore 
likely to succeed, yet by association have learned to be 
broadly sympathetic with all activities and with all classes 
of effective people. 

We have thus learned that it is not only unnecessary but 
unwise to segregate an interest from its associations, and 
the state universities, which attempt to reflect in their cur- 
ricula and their atmosphere the whole life of the people, 
are gradually coming to be regarded as the highest expres- 
sion of the truest philosophy of universal education. In a 
word, I would see their policy transferred to the American 
high school, to the end that this most representative of all 
schools may do for the masses what the university is doing 
for the few. 

A privately endowed institution may of course teach what 
it pleases, and one supported by tuition must teach what the 
students come to learn, but institutions of learning of all 
grades supported by public funds are morally bound to 
truly reflect the life of the people, and it is for this reason 
that I invite the American high school — which is not a 
preparatory school — to study and to imitate the policy 
of the state universities. 

I do not propose industrial education in the high school as 
the easiest way of meeting the demand, but as, all things 
considered, the best way. Far from being the easiest way, 
I am convinced that so far as present comfort is concerned, 
it is the most difficult. It is the results that mightily 
justify our labors, however, and make it wise to expend 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN HIGH SCHOOLS 49 

some special energy in meeting this as we shall need to 
meet other and future new demands as they arise from 
time to time. 

So it will be worth the trouble for the high schools to take 
in and take care of this latest demand of our people, never 
fearing but that the funds will be forthcoming as its use- 
fulness is proved, and resting well assured that other and 
still other similar opportunities will arise in the future as 
they attempt to meet and serve the needs of this rapidly 
developing people with its complex life and its progressive 
activities. 

What then is involved in this great duty which includes, 
but does not end with, industrial education ? 

First of all, and in all, and above all, this is involved — 
that the American high school must study and teach 
American life as a whole. The glory of Greece ! How 
was it evolved, mostly within the short space of one hun- 
dred and fifty years ? Not alone or mainly by the medi- 
tative study of Babylonian antiquities, but by the universal 
belief in and study of Greece, her people, her institutions, 
her interests, and her activities. Now, I would be the last 
to decry the study of ancient languages, literatures, and 
institutions, but I would be the first to insist that it should 
be done for a purpose beyond mere personal gratification, 
and that its high purpose be the upbuilding here among 
ourselves of the most complete development of which our 
race is capable. To this exalted end I invite all schools of 
all grades everywhere, but first of all, and more than all, the 
American secondary school, because it has its roots in the 
very lives and hearts of the people ; and so I would put 
industrial education into the schools, not altogether be- 
cause it is demanded, but because it is an essential part of 
a system of education that aims at racial development. 



50 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

More specifically, what details are involved if we take this 
matter of industrial education into the high school ? So 
far as agriculture is concerned, and the present movement 
has come largely from that side, I am comparatively clear. 

I doubt much whether the high school in the heart of a 
great city has a function in and for agriculture as we of 
the country understand the term. It may teach it, or 
certain phases of it, for pedagogical reasons, and upon 
that point educators who have had experience are most com- 
petent to judge ; but when we of the farm are talking about 
agriculture in the high school, we do not mean nature 
study, nor do we mean a slight inclination of science and 
mathematics to country affairs for illustrative purposes. 
That doubtless is good pedagogy in itself, but when we 
talk about agriculture in these schools, we mean a real 
study of and real instruction in those things that are in- 
volved in the business of farming and in the affairs of 
country life. 

We do not, therefore, ask the city high school to teach 
agriculture unless it finds it advantageous to its general in- 
terests to do so, but of the country high school and of the 
village high school with a large country constituency, we 
do ask it. 

And what is it that we ask ? Not that the whole art 
and business of agriculture should be taught, and above 
all, we do not ask that the school become an agricultural 
institute. But we do ask that certain characteristic 
phases of the farming business and of country life be 
carefully studied and taught along with other things, upon 
»the ground that it is the business of the high school to take 
note of and to reflect as far as possible the major activities 
and the conditions of life of the people whose children are 
to be educated, and on the further ground that, whatever the 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN HIGH SCHOOLS 51 

future career, the education of the young should begin at 
and be at least partly concerned with the life activities into 
which the child was born, and with which only he holds 
living acquaintance. 

Nor is this so difficult of accomplishment as it may seem. 
To study the lives of the people — of our people in these 
days — is the fundamental business of the schools, and to 
add to this something of vocational technique is not an in- 
surmountable task. It is not the art of agriculture — that 
is, its handicraft — that needs most to be taught. That is 
long and difficult of accomplishment. Moreover, it is more 
a matter of practice than of instruction, and therefore of 
questionable educational value. It is the science of agri- v i 
culture and the economic and social conditions of country J\ 
life that need teaching most, and that is what the schools^ 
are best fitted to undertake. 

The farmer understands the art of agriculture fairly well. 
Handicraft is his long suit, and to teach him much in that 
direction would require the trade school. This may come 
in time for certain branches, as, for example, dairying, but 
what is most needed now is such scientific study and moral 
support of agriculture as only the well-established high 
schools can give — and when I say agriculture I mean not 
only the business of farming but the affairs of country living, 
for agriculture is not only an occupation but a mode of 
life as well. 

Farmers understand the art of agriculture fairly well, 
but they do not understand the science of agriculture, or, 
in other words, they do not understand either the sciences 
that underlie agriculture or their application to its affairs. 
This information, so far at least as it applies to such fun- 
damental facts as soil fertility, plant and animal improve- 
ment, animal nutrition, home equipment and sanitation, 



52 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

any good high school can, if it will, within the limits of 
stock knowledge, arrange to supply; and if it is a high school 
undertaking to educate country youth, then this informa- 
tion and help is not only its rarest privilege but its most 
sacred duty. 

What is needed to start with is for the high schools to 
put in one or two elective courses in agriculture, and to 
teach these courses the best they can. An honest attempt 
will, here as elsewhere, produce substantial results. The 
teacher of science is the natural one to begin it, but as soon 
as possible a teacher should be provided who has special 
training in the science of agriculture. Do you say that 
such teachers are not available ? They are coming along, 
and the demand will be answered in good time by a 
supply. Only show the teacher how he can better his 
condition and, like other men, he will jump at the chance. 
Text-books, too, are now available, others are in prepara- 
tion, and matters are moving rapidly ; indeed more of real 
value has been accomplished in this direction in the last 
two years than was accomplished during the first thirty 
years of the attempt to establish agricultural colleges. 
The materials for this work are now well at hand, as will 
be shown in a succeeding chapter. 

Again, no school has a rarer chance to study, to teach, 
and to impress the great fundamentals of human living and 
social and economic relations than has the high school 
within reach of a country community. Here life is un- 
adulterated with much that disturbs elsewhere, and here a 
miracle awaits the hand of the teacher who fully realizes 
his opportunity to influence the life of his people in his own 
day and time. 

What I have said of agriculture I am convinced applies 
equally well to household affairs, only at this point all high 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN HIGH SCHOOLS 53 

schools are certainly involved. By the division of labor 
anciently established and for which both custom and nature 
are responsible, the care of the house is woman's work, and 
whatever the choice of individuals, we as educators have 
no right to take possession of young girls and keep them 
in the schools till they are young women of marriageable 
age, without turning them back to the community at least 
somewhat better prepared than they would otherwise have 
been to meet the responsibilities and the work of woman. 
If the influence of our schools is mainly or strongly to turn 
our women into clerks, or even teachers, then, useful as 
these callings are, the quicker we amend our system of 
education, the better. The business of the schools is to 
train the great mass of the people for normal lives and to y\ 
preserve, not to destroy, what may be called, for want of a 
better term, the eternal balance of things. 

Schools have much to do to compensate for the fact that 
they take the children out of real life for a period of years 
into an artificial world that we call the schoolhouse. They 
come out of it with stores of information, to be sure, but 
they have lost a subtle something that comes only from 
personal experience in real life during the days of develop- 
ment. We are coming at last to realize that there is more 
than one avenue to a successful life, that the way by the school- 
house may not be the best for all people, and that whether 
it is the best will depend upon whether the school gives a 
true or a distorted picture of life. Is the mirror of life 
which the schools hold up a true one ? Is it badly concave 
or convex at any point .'' If so, that concavity or convexity 
needs correction. 

The farm and the shop and the work of the household 
have a marked influence in developing executive ability and 
the power of initiative quite independent of the acquisition 



54 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

of knowledge, and if we make the mistake of substituting 
mere accumulation of facts for this sort of development, 
and sacrifice the one for the other, it is more than an open 
question if on the whole we have not lost more than we 
have gained. It is the business of the schools to impart 
the one without the loss of the others, an additional reason 
for saying that much lies back of our problem besides the 
mere need for industrial training. 

In a discussion like this I feel bound to say something 
about the mechanical industries which, like agriculture, are 
fundamental, not only because they concern vast masses 
of men but because the industries themselves lie at the basis 
of our further development. ' 

What I can say on this point, however, is more by infer- 
ence than from intimate knowledge. I certainly hold most 
strenuously that training in the use of certain tools is funda- 
mental to all education. The square, the saw, the plane, 
the hammer, the needle, and the scissors, like the alphabet, 
lie at the bottom of civilization. They also afford the most 
direct, convenient, and rapid means for teaching not only 
that cooperation of eye and hand but also that rapid and 
ready execution of plans which marks the truly educated 
man or woman. All this is already recognized for peda- 
gogic reasons alone, and we have both sewing and manual 
training in our schools everywhere. 

But this is quite aside from the other question — shall 
these things be taught for the sake of the mechanic indus- 
tries and as avenues to an occupation ? I cannot escape 
the conviction that they should. If the schools of a great 
city do not reflect the life of that city, industrial as well as 
otherwise, then will the best children leave the schools or 
else, what is worse, the schools will distort the social and 
economic conditions of that city. I repeat in this connec- 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN HIGH SCHOOLS 55 

tion what I have said too often already — if we are to have 
a system of universal education, then it must universally 
educate, or we shall be the worse for it, and will one day 
reckon with the consequences. 

These boys on the school seats in the grades ! Their 
fathers are in the counting house, the store, the factory, 
the rolling mill, the foundry, and in the street-cleaning de- 
partment. What of the boys ? Side by side they sit to 
imbibe together a conception of the world and form some 
sort of plan for their own careers. It is the business of the 
school to help them. It cannot do that by advising them 
all to become merchants, because all the occupations must 
go on in the future as in the past and, in general, these 
boys will be doing in a decade about what their fathers 
are doing now. It cannot be predicted of any particular 
boy that he will follow his father's occupation and he 
ought not, but it can be said with confidence of a room- 
ful that they will be doing the same things their fathers 
are doing, because we are talking about a system of edu- 
cation for all the people. 

After the schools have done their best, much will be left 
over for the minor industries, and here is the undoubted 
function of the trade school, but if we cannot and do not 
reflect the major industries in our school system, then we 
do not make them highly useful. We do wrong to absorb 
several years of a child's life without turning him out 
better able to support himself than if he had not attended 
school. 

Just where to draw the Hne between the ordinary schools 
and the trade schools is not easy ; indeed, I think it is im- 
possible now to say, but I propose as a matter of safety 
and to facilitate the drawing of that line later — if ever — 
that the trade schools be also a part of the system and 



56 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

under the same management as our other schools. Nobody 
holds any longer to the three learned professions. The 
list of honorable occupations touched and uplifted by edu- 
cation is being rapidly lengthened to the substantial benefit 
of all concerned and the list of so-called trades correspond- 
ingly shortened. Some time these limits will be better 
defined than now, but in the meantime let us so adminis- 
ter our education that an occupation may take its place in 
respectable society as soon and as rapidly as it accumulates 
a sufficient body of knowledge of a high order. 

It is within my own lifetime that agriculture has fought 
for and won a place as a dignified calling and shown that 
for the common good the lands ought to be in the hands 
of enlightened people. In the same way many other call- 
ings will be elevated by the advantages of education if only 
favorable opportunity is afforded, and we will all agree that 
the gauge of our civilization will in the end be fixed by the 
status acquired by our leading necessary occupations. 

To facilitate the rapid passing of these occupations to 
the highest state and to hold the situation together, I ear- 
nestly advocate the ownership and management of all trade 
schools and all other schools possible by the same boards of 
education and the same superintendents that fix the policy 
of the public school system. 

If we can do this, then much of the vocational can be 
introduced into high schools without detriment but to infi- 
nite advantage, each school emphasizing the major indus- 
tries of its own constituency. If we cannot do this, there 
is the greatest danger that our delinquent children may be 
turned out of our semi-reformatory industrial schools really 
better fitted for useful lives than are most of the children 
of normal citizens. There is evidence that the public 
already has its attention upon this point. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN HIGH SCHOOLS 57 

I have a vision of a system of secondary education so 
correlated with the grades upon the one hand and with the 
activities of life upon the other that the children need not 
declare in advance what their occupation is to be. The 
man who enters college ought to know definitely what he 
purposes to do, but the secondary school should be a place 
wherein the boy can find himself and pick his place in the 
world of active affairs. I would have not one but many 
courses out of this school leading into life — some into the 
trades, some into business, some into the professions, and 
some into college for those who know what they want of 
higher education, why they need it, and, moreover, who 
have the ambition to get it. There are too many young 
men to-day who leave the high school because it does not 
seem to be fitting them for the life they have the itching 
ambition to begin; and there are too many other young 
men in the universities who are shot there out of the high 
school much as the wind stacker delivers straw. 

This is because we have not yet fully realized the com- 
plexity of the educational process, and it is because we 
have not yet sufficiently provided in our system for all the 
needs of all the people. 

Now the secondary schools, if they exist for anything, 
are to administer universal education and make it apply to 
as many individuals as possible. They reach and touch 
the boy and the girl while yet members of the father's 
household, and I protest with all the earnestness of which 
I am capable that their business is to teach these people 
to get ready to live, and that without reference to college 
admission. It is a mistake to assume that the matter and 
sequence that best fit for college also constitute the best 
preparation for life without a college course, and that high 
school which allows the requirements of the accredited list 



58 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

to dominate its policy is headed wrong in its philosophy of 
universal education. 

It is for the secondary schools and the grades that lead 
up to them to serve the people in their needs — all the 
people in all their needs for everyday life. Anything less 
than this is that much short of universal education. The 
exceptional man is well served already, and his way is likely 
to be paved with all the helps that are good for him. In 
any event, the spirit of the times is not to overlook the 
common man whom also the Lord loveth. 

Can the high schools turn their backs upon vocational 
training of any major kind and say, " Let the trade schools 
do that " } Dare they do it } If they do, as sure as time 
goes on, the people will establish industrial schools of their 
own that meet their needs directly, and we have lost our 
hold forever upon the industrial class which represents the 
mass ; we have lost forever the opportunity to hold to- 
gether productive industry and the higher mental life, and 
when our high schools have lost this opportunity, they are 
public schools no longer ; the masses will withdraw their 
money as well as their attendance, our boasted public 
school system will exist only for the few, and our people 
will have broken into two classes, the leisure and the 
industrial, each schooled in its own fashion, the two inevi- 
tably drifting farther and farther apart, generation by gen- 
eration. 

Within a year two famous British educators on two 
separate occasions said to me in substance in my office • 
'' Does America fully understand her two stupendous 
advantages } " I asked, " What are they t " and they said, 
"Your people are yet a homogeneous people, and your 
secondary schools are public schools." 

What they meant was that we have yet no peasant class, 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN HIGH SCHOOLS 59 

but are one people, and our secondary schools, being 
creatures of the public and not of a church or of any other 
class, could minister fully and freely to the public need as 
they saw fit. 

This great problem goes far back and beyond the definite 
question of industrial education. If we are to make the 
most of our opportunity, we must truly educate all the 
people in ways that they will regard as useful to themselves 
and that experience will prove to be beneficial to the race 
as a whole. If we cannot do this, we shall break in two at 
some point, and once apart we shall never reunite. It is 
not easy, because the problem is complicated and there 
are few precedents. But it is worth the while. 

Fortunately the precedents are all encouraging. The 
state universities have shown that no natural antagonism 
exists between the different interests of men as represented 
on higher educational levels. The high school is yet nearer 
to the people, and all attempts that have been made there 
to meet real and living needs have met with instant suc- 
cess, and that, too, without injury to the higher educational 
spirit and ideals but vastly to their betterment. 

There are great times just ahead if we are wise. The 
people will give of their substance freely if the education 
of their young can be made useful. If we can do this, then 
can we add to industry both culture and refinement ; then 
will great souls arise from all the walks of life and we shall 
be one people. I beg you, my fellow-teachers, to study 
this problem as your religion. The fates have put it upon 
you to settle. A generation or two and it will be too late. 
And as you settle it do not shirk labor, do not fly to the 
separate school because it is easier, but treasure as your life, 
I beg of you, the universaHty, the integrity, and the unity 
of the American educational system. 



CHAPTER III 

INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION A PHASE OF THE PROBLEM 
OF UNIVERSAL EDUCATION i 

To see to it that no individual shall be obliged to choose between 
an education without a vocation and a vocation without an education. 

No system of education, however good in itself, can 
claim to be or hope to become universal if it does not 
touch and benefit all classes of men and all legitimate 
branches of their activity, both industrial and non-indus- 
trial, vocational and non-vocational. I take it that univer- 
sal education means exactly what it says — the education 
of all sorts of men for all sorts of purposes and in all sorts 
of subjects that can contribute to the efficiency of the 
individual in a professional way or awake and develop the 
best that was born into him as a human being. 

Looked at in this broad way, industrial education does 
not differ logically from any other form of professional 
training that requires a large body of highly specialized 
knowledge. Nor do industrial people as such necessarily 
constitute a class by themselves, but are men like other 
men who love and hate, who earn and spend, who read 
and think, and act and vote, and do any and all other acts 
which may be performed by any other citizen. Now all of 
this leads me to maintain the thesis that industrial educa- 
tion is not a thing apart, but is only a phase, albeit an im- 
portant phase, of our general system of universal education, 

* See also address at the superintendents' section of the N. E. A. at Chicago, February 
25, 1909. 

60 



THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL EDUCATION 6l 

a thesis that is more plausible when we remember that 
every man needs two educations, one that is vocational and 
one that is not — one that will fit him to work and one 
that will fit him to live. When we remember that there is 
less difference between industry and occupation than we 
once assumed; when we remember that ninety per cent 
of the people follow industrial pursuits and will continue 
to do so ; when we remember that all major industries, like 
other essential activities, must go on in the future as in 
the past, even though every man in the community were a 
college graduate, and when we remember that it is for the 
public good that these major industries be developed and 
occupied by educated men, surely this position is not un- 
reasonable. 

All parties are agreed that in order to secure a fair de- 
gree of efficiency some sort of specialized instruction should 
be given in industrial pursuits. The old apprentice sys- 
tem has passed away, and the work of instruction for indus- 
trial efficiency seems to be thrown upon the schools. It is 
a 'new problem, and they appear not to know quite what to 
do with it. It is perfectly clear that industrial education 
calls for new and different courses of instruction from 
those designed to fit for non-industrial pursuits. The only 
question is whether these specialized courses of instruction 
constitute a part of our public school duty or whether the 
peculiar educational needs of industry and of industrial 
people may be left to take care of themselves. In dis- 
cussing industrial education, as with all other forms of 
education, it must always be remembered that we are 
dealing with the man as well as with the craftsman, and 
I use the term craftsman in its broadest sense to cover the 
work of the lawyer as well as that of the farmer. 

And this man ; what of him ? Surely he is a factor in the 



62 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

case. He is something more than a farmer or a doctor or 
a lawyer, or else he is something less than a man. His 
education is not to be limited by the demands of his voca- 
tion. We have too many of that kind already in all pro- 
fessions constituting a kind of museum of educated parrots 
that go through their daily stunts, each considering himself 
highly educated and all other men at best merely trained. 

Yes, the man himself, the human element in the case, 
must be educated. And if he be truly educated he will 
be trained in some profession — no matter what — and he 
will also be trained outside of his profession so that he. will 
be bigger than the means whereby he earns his bread and 
butter ; and this applies to all men of all vocations, for 
there is no such thing as a learned profession except in the 
sense that all the major activities are learned. 

So I lay down the proposition that whether the educa- 
tion be industrial or otherwise vocational, it is but a part, 
though an essential part, of the education of a man, and 
that all these specialized forms of vocational instruction 
are but different phases of our problem of universal 
education, to which we as a people are committed. 

Like all great purposes actuating the masses of men, the 
development of this idea of universal education has been a 
growth. It began with the conviction that in justice to the 
individual and for the safety of the state, all men of all 
classes should possess at least the rudiments of learning, 
and the first step toward a complete system of universal 
education was the free public school wherein the child of the 
rich and of the poor alike, whether genius or dullard, may 
learn to read and to write and to reason, which after all are 
fundamental to all education. Our elementary education 
is universal in the sense that it applies to ail the children 
of all classes of people and without discrimination. 



THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL EDUCATION 6^ 

This marked a new epoch in the life of industrial people, 
because hitherto the policy of the world had been to keep 
working folk ignorant, apparently in order that they might 
remain contented with the hard lot to which Providence had 
presumably assigned them; because, forsooth, must there 
not be hewers of wood and drawers of water ? So were laid 
the foundations for a system of universal education — uni- 
versal in the sense that it applied to all men — affording 
not only the rudiments of learning but opening a highway 
even to the college and the learned professions, and 
many escaped thereby from a hard life of toil. 

But no scheme of education is truly universal or can hope 
to become so until it not only touches and uplifts all classes 
of men but also touches and uplifts their industries as 
well ; for it is not expedient that men should desert indus- 
try as soon as they are educated, but rather that they should 
remain and apply their education to the development of the 
industries, that the public may be better served and the 
economic balance of things be not disturbed by the evolution 
of an educational system aiming to become universal. 

The need of attention at this point became evident, es- 
pecially to industrial people, and on July 2, 1862, Abraham 
Lincoln affixed his signature to the most far-reaching bit i/ 
of federal legislation ever enacted. I refer to the Land /V 
Grant Act, whereby there was provided for each state of the 
Union "at least one college whose leading object shall be, 
without excluding other scientific and classical studies . . . 
to teach such branches of learning as are related to agri- 
culture and the mechanic arts ... in order to promote 
the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes 
in the several pursuits and professions of life." Here we 
have the whole scheme not only of industrial but of uni- 
versal education in a nutshell — a liberal and practical ed- 



64 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

ucation without excluding scientific and classical studies : 
what a text for an educational discourse ! 

Building on this broadest of educational foundations, 
most of the states have established industrial education on 
a new basis, and some of them have so combined and in- 
terwoven it with other forms of education that none can 
tell where the one leaves off and the other begins. These 
are the state universities whose lead in this respect is be- 
ing rapidly followed by institutions not on the land grant 
foundation, until now we can truly say that on college levels 
to-day industrial education is not a thing apart, but is an 
integral portion of the great educational effort by which 
the people of a commonwealth seek to so educate all classes 
of men as to develop at the same time not only their intel- 
lect, their literature, and their art, but their industries, their 
occupations, and their activities generally. This is univer- 
sal education in its fullest sense. 

Our elementary education, therefore, is universal in a 
sufficient sense for its purpose, and our university education 
is rapidly becoming universal in its broadest sense, because 
here all subjects are studied and taught and all occupations 
and industries are represented and made to flourish in a 
common atmosphere of higher education. 

But as yet we have no system of secondary education 
that can be called universal, and until the matter is settled 
at this point and settled right our system is weak at its 
most important level, because it is our secondary education 
that touches our people during their formative period and 
that really reaches the masses in such a way as to be truly 
universal in extent. 

I say that our secondary education is not yet universal. 
True, the high schools are open to all who have finished 
the grades, but they do not offer to most classes of people 



THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL EDUCATION 65 

that instruction which is a preparation for their lives and 
which the needs of the times and the impulse of the 
people demand. 

The high schools took their cue originally from the old- 
time academies, which were training schools for classical 
colleges. Since then primary education has become uni- 
versal because it involved nothing but opening the schools 
to all the people free of tuition. The education of the 
colleges has become or is rapidly becoming universal be- 
cause the people demand that the benefits of higher edu- 
cation shall not be limited to a few favored occupations 
and those who follow them — all upon the ground that 
such a course would be pernicious, because against the 
public welfare. 

The same influences are beginning to work in our 
high schools, which are^ moving in the wake of the 
colleges, it seems to me, in a way that is wholly com- 
mendable and that needs only to be accelerated and not 
retarded. 

The high schools are schools of the people, and in re- 
sponse to their demand they have added to the old-time 
classical courses those in modern science, in manual train- 
ing, in household science and, indeed, many are now adding 
agriculture, stenography, telegraphy, bookkeeping, type 
setting and a list of vocational courses almost too long to 
be mentioned, all without prejudice but vastly to the en- 
richment of the old-time courses of study. 

So the high schools are rapidly following in the lead of 
the colleges, and if matters go on as they are now drifting 
in some of our best schools, it will not be long until, in re- 
sponse to public demand and common sense, we shall have 
a complete system of universal education in the largest 
sense of the term and of all grades, from the elementary 



66 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

schools upward, in which men and women of all kinds and 
preferences will be able to get that education which will 
not only fit them for life but fit them to live. In the name 
of progress let this good work go on. 

There are but three influences, it seems to me, that can 
interfere with the proper evolution of the high school. They 
may be outlined as follows : — 

1. The movement in certain quarters for separate indus- 
trial schools ^ — agricultural schools in the country and 
trade schools in the city — quite independent of the high 
school system, which is assumed to be indifferent if not an- 
tagonistic to industrial life. 

2. The attitude of a few remaining exponents of the old 
idea that schools should teach nothing that by any possi- 
bility could be put to any manner of use. 

3. The difficulty involved on the part of the high schools 
in adding not only to their educational purpose but to their 
courses of study, their equipment, and their teaching force, 
with sufficient rapidity to meet the new demands and mold 
the whole into an educational unity without such delay as 
shall make the claim seem true that after all the high 
schools have no real desire to serve the people in their in- 
dustrial activities and will do no more than is necessary to 
half satisfy what they regard as an irrational public demand. 
Thus the high schools are put at a disadvantage at this 
most difficult period in their evolution, particularly as 
teachers are yet to be made, even while these new ideals 
are to be fittedinto and made a part of our permanent edu- 
cational policies. 

These considerations are worth reviewing at the present 
juncture, because what the high schools need is time, and 
this is the element in the case least likely to be afforded. 
The activity of certain educators in favor of separate agri- 



THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL EDUCATION 67 

cultural schools of one kind or another, and what I am 
bound to call the selfish influence of certain commercial in- 
terests demanding city trade schools to teach the sort of 
handicraft which will produce skilled workmen in the 
shortest possible time and best enable us to meet foreign 
or other competition in manufactured articles — this activity 
and this influence seem ready to sacrifice almost anything 
for immediate results. This American edition of the Ger- 
man peasant school idea is a most dangerous because a 
most insidious and powerful menace to the right develop- 
ment of the American high school, which is or may be the 
most unique educational institution on earth, and which 
will constitute, if it can rightly develop, the key to the ad- 
vantageous position which America ought to occupy both 
socially, politically, and economically, and which she can 
occupy if she is farsighted enough at this point and at 
this time. , 

If present tendencies can go on unhampered it will not 
be long until every community can have its high school 
which will reflect with a fair degree of accuracy its major 
industries and do it in the light of the world's knowledge 
and of the world's ideals. Such schools will turn out men 
and women ready to do the world's work and to think the 
world's thoughts as well as to dream the world's dreams and 
share in its ambitions. If we combine our energies, we can 
have such schools in America wherein every young man and 
every young woman can secure an education that is at once 
useful and cultural, and that, too, within driving distance of 
the father's door. If we unite our educational energies, 
we can do this, but we cannot do it in separate schools. 

We can combine the vocational and the non-vocational 
in our high schools if we will, and each be better for the 
other, and all things considered, I must earnestly advocate 



68 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

the taking over of our industrial education in all its forms 
into the existing system of secondary schools, seeing to it 
that one fourth the time of every pupil is devoted to some- 
thing vocational, something industrial, if you please, and 
no industry is too common to use for this purpose. It is 
the common things of life that are fundamental, and it is 
through them that we teach life itself. 

It is not necessary to bring all occupations and industries 
into our schools ; some are not well adapted to academic 
conditions, but it is necessary that we bring in a goodly va- 
riety of what may be called the major activities, industrial 
and non-industrial, in order ,that life shall be taught in a va- 
riety of its forms and that the boy shall have a reasonable 
chance for choice. 

Trade schools — would you have them ? By all means, 
but I would have them as a part of the secondary school 
system. Agricultural schools .'' Yes, but as departments of 
the high school. Cooking schools ? Yes, and more : I would 
have schools of household affairs, but I would have them 
as integral parts of the high school. Schools of stenography 
and typewriting ? Yes, but I would not disconnect them 
from the high school any more than I would cut off from 
womankind the girl who needs perhaps for a time, perhaps 
always, to earn her own money. 

In brief, there is no class of occupation that is followed 
by large masses of people that I would not bring into the 
high school and teach as fully as circumstances would per- 
mit, and I would compel every student to devote not less 
than one fourth and not more than one half of his time to 
these occupational lines. 

I have said that a second influence operating to restrain 
the high schools from moving in this matter as fast as con- 
ditions require is the remnant of an old academic belief 



THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL EDUCATION 69 

that the purpose of schools is to " make men," whatever 
that may be, as distinct from making men ready for life. 
These are they who would teach nothing that could by any 
means be put to any sort of use. With them education is 
a luxury, not a necessity ; a kind of holy thing that evapo- 
rates or in some way loses its essence when put to common 
uses or into the hands of the masses of men. 

These are they who are always careful to speak of in- 
dustrial education as " training," using a term whose 
meaning is understood from its frequent application to 
horses and dogs. 

To such let me say that the thing which all men every- 
where now demand, whatever their vocation or means of 
livelihood, is not training merely, but education^ and they 
mean by that such contact and intimacy with the world's 
stock of knowledge as shall first of all develop the indus- 
try, and second, but not secondarily, develop also the man. 

Thinking men now know that, education or no education, 
culture or no culture, whatever the grade of civilization we 
may evolve, certain fundamental industries must still go on. 
Moreover, they know that if these fundamental industries 
are to be well conducted and our natural resources devel- 
oped, these activities must be in the hands of capable 
men ; yes, of educated men, for industry, like every other 
activity of man, is capable of development by means of 
orderly knowledge and trained minds. 

These thinking people know, too, that men of capacity 
cannot be found to develop these fundamentals except they 
may also themselves partake of the blessings of life and 
the full fruits of our civilization. They know that the days 
of hewers of wood and drawers of water, as such — con- 
demned to a life of drudgery — are over on this earth 
wherever civilization exists, and that education, like reli- 



70 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

gion, must somewhat rapidly readjust itself to new condi- 
tions and prepare to help the common average man to lead 
a life that is both useful to the community and a satisfac- 
tion to himself. 

The aristocracy of education, like the aristocracy of reli- 
w,„.^ion, whereby a few were saved while the many groaned, 
J is over, and education, like religion, must help the common 
man to meet and solve the common issues of life better than 
they have ever been met and solved before — hence indus- 
trial education ; hence vocational education; hence univer- 
sal education. 

These good people who shy at the term industrial edu- 
cation are remnants of a past condition when educators and 
others entertained that old-time and curious conception of 
industry, whereby industrial people were assumed to remain 
uneducated and were by common consent assigned to a 
social position of natural inferiority, as if a farmer or me- 
chanic, for example, acquired by his daily life a kind of 
toxic poison that not only destroyed his better faculties but 
was likely to exude and soil or injure others. 

Let me call the attention of these good people to the fact 
that, whatever their social status, the industrial people hold 
the balance of power politically and socially, for they con- 
stitute ninety per cent of the population, and that for all 
practical purposes, and in the last analysis, they are the 
people, and their education, whatever it is, will really consti- 
tute our system just as their numbers will largely dominate 
our affairs generally and fix the status of our civilization. 

The colleges learned long ago that to meet modern needs 
they must afford every man two educations : one, technical, 
to meet his business needs and make him an efficient mem- 
ber of society, but which would tend to narrow him as a 
man ; the other non-vocational, which has no money-making 



THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL EDUCATION 71 

power, but whose effect is to liberalize and broaden the 
man by attracting his interests and widening his knowledge 
outside the field wherein he gains his livelihood. 

The high schools must learn the same lesson, and the 
sooner they do so the better for all interests. Therefore 
these high schools that are introducing the industrial are 
developing in the right way. The high schools are not 
preparatory schools for college. They are preeminently the 
schools wherein the people are fitted for life. Where one 
man is educated in college, twenty will get all their prepa- 
ration in high schools. The high school, therefore, is the 
place wherein the boy shall find himself to the end that if 
he goes to college he will have upon matriculation clear 
ideas about what he intends to do, and if he does not, he 
can go out from the high school at once and take some use- 
ful part in the world's work. The large number of high 
school men, even graduates, who have no plans and more 
than all no fitness, preparation, or inclination, for any sort 
of useful activity, is a pathetic and dangerous fact — pa- 
thetic, because so much good material has been wasted ; 
dangerous, because the high schools must either change 
their ideals and introduce the industrial freely, or the in- 
dustrial masses will found other schools of their own that 
will meet their needs as they have been met on college 
levels, but as they have not yet been met in secondary 
grades where the masses go. 

The colleges have learned that it is not necessary to 
absorb all the time of a student in order to turn out an effi- 
cient man vocationally. Much less is it necessary in sec- 
ondary schools. On college levels from one half to two 
thirds of the student's time suffices for the vocational, and 
when we learn better how to teach, results can doubtless 
be attained with still less, leaving a generous amount of 



72 EDUCATIOlSr FOR EFFICIENCY 

time for the pursuit of non-vocational and therefore of 
liberalizing courses, for the effect of a course of study, 
whether narrowing or broadening, depends less upon the 
subject-matter than upon the attitude of the student and 
the purpose for which he takes the course. Chemistry to 
the farmer is a professional subject; to the journalist or 
the lawyer it is non-professional and liberalizing. 

If we will honestly take into our high schools as we have 
taken into our universities all the major activities, splitting 
no hairs as between the industrial and the professional, 
for no man can define the difference so imperceptibly do 
they shade the one into the other — if we will take them 
all into the high school as we have already taken them 
into the universities, and carry them along together, the 
vocational and the non-vocational side by side, day after 
day, from first to last, so the boy is never free from either, 
then will all our educational necessities be met and we 
shall have gained a goodly number of substantial achieve- 
ments, prominent among which I would mention the fol- 
lowing : — 

1. One fourth of the time of the boy or girl could be 
devoted to vocational work in class room or laboratory 
throughout the course. 

2. This would turn out every boy with some skill in some 
branch of the world's work, and do away with that large 
and growing number of young high school graduates who 
are fitted for nothing and are good for nothing in particular. 

3. It would attract the attention of the boy to self-sup- 
porting activity before he loses his natural ambition by too 
much schooling with no initiative. 

4. It would turn out girls with some training in house- 
hold affairs, and those who desired it in such occupations as 
women follow for self-support. 



THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL EDUCATION 7;^ 

5. It would vastly uplift most occupations and all of 
the more ordinary industries by bringing into their practice 
the benefit of trained minds and methods. 

6. It can do all this and still leave three fourths of the 
time for the acquisition of those non-vocational lines of 
knowledge which all men and women need, because they 
are human beings getting ready to live in a most interest- 
ing world. 

7. In this way, we should have a single system of edu- 
cation under a single management, but giving to all young 
men and women really two educations : one that is voca- 
tional, fitting them to be self-supporting and useful, the 
other non-vocational and looking to their own develop- 
ment. 

Expensive ? Not more so than to have it done in sep- 
arate schools, surely. It will be done somehow, and the 
question now is, will the high schools really rise to their 
opportunity and secure through themselves a real system 
of universal education, or are they to lose their chance and 
are we to have in the end not a real but only a patchwork 
imitation of a system of universal education ? 

I am well aware that all this will be held by some as 
a lowering of standards and a degrading of education by 
commercializing it. Against this conclusion I protest 
most emphatically. Does it degrade a thing to use it ? 
Does it degrade religion to uplift the fallen or to sustain 
the masses of men from falling ? Is education a luxury 
to be restricted to a few favored fortunates, or is it a power 
to uplift and sustain and develop all men ? 

Are you afraid to educate the ditch digger ? Is the edu- 
cation of the gentleman too good for him .? Are the facts 
of history too profound or the satisfaction of knowledge 
too precious to be the common property of man ? Does 



X 



74 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

it make my satisfaction less when it makes his more, or 
are we afraid that he will climb out of the ditch if he is 
enlightened ? There is no danger of that. I have dug 
ditch and laid tile every month of the year, and that since 
I was a college graduate, and I am ready to do it again. 
I am ready to do my share of the world's work ; yes, of 
the world's dirty work. It was Colonel Waring who 
cleaned up New York City. It was the educated engi- 
neer who made a sanitary Cuba. The educated man does 
anything that needs to be done to get results. It is the 
uneducated or the badly educated who fails to comprehend 
the eternal balance of things. 

I desire to call attention to one more phase of our prob- 
lem ; to what may be called our leisure asset. There are 
two leisure classes, one small and unimportant, the other 
large and important. The first consists of the idle rich 
who by accident were born after their fathers, and who 
intend to live a parasitic existence, paying for their needs 
with other people's money. They are altogether useless. 
It matters little how they are educated, and the sooner they 
die off the better for the world. They do not think ; they 
do not act ; they only vegetate and glitter ; they do not 
enter into the discussion here. The wealthy who do not 
belong to this class are too busy for leisure. 

The other leisure class is the great industrial mass, who, 
after all, own and control about all the useful leisure in the 
world. The minister has no leisure. The teacher has no 
leisure. The lawyer, the leader everywhere, has no lei- 
sure. What he does he does under pressure and because 
he must. 

But the farmer, the craftsman, the industriahst generally, 
labors only in the daylight hours and for a portion of his 
time. What he does with the balance of his waking energies 



THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL EDUCATION 75 

is of the utmost concern. Here is the great racial asset, 
both social and psychical ; both economic and political. 

If this great mass of men, constituting all but the degen- 
erates, can be properly educated, the racial asset of their 
leisure moments will in the end be tremendous. It is this 
mass and what it thinks and does in its leisure hours, either 
blindly or intelligently, that will ultimately fix the trend of 
our development and the limits of our achievements, not 
only in politics and in business but in literature and art as 
well. There is no reason why the craftsman should not 
be also a connoisseur in lines outside his personal and daily 
activities. It is better, therefore, that our common people 
be educated and educated broadly. 

Moreover, it is out of this mass that leaders arise, and if 
their education be sound, then will our leaders be wise and 
safe. You cannot longer maintain an educated aristocracy. 
There will be but one aristocracy, and that will be the aris- 
tocracy of personal achievement ; and if we do not want 
the world entirely commercialized, we must so merge our 
industrial education into our general system as to have in 
the end not a mass of separate schools with distracting 
aims and purposes, but a single system of education serv- 
ing all classes and all interests. It is the only influence 
that will preserve a homogeneous people. 

In thus amalgamating the vocational and the non-voca- 
tional, I would like to say a word for what might be called 
the parallel system as distinct from the stratified. That is, 
I would have a boy from his first day in the high school to 
his last have to do with both the vocational and the non- 
vocational. I would have him every day take stock of 
things vocational in terms of world values. I would have 
him devote a full fourth of his time to what will bring him 
earning power, to be used for that purpose if he needs it 



76 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

and to give him an independent spirit if he does not need 
it. Every man is a better man if he feels the power to 
earn his way, whether he needs to do it or not. 

Do you say that this will so cut into his time as to 
prevent his getting an all-round education ? Then I say 
that he will never get an all-round education anyway; 
that the most he knows at forty will be learned out of 
school, and that the business of the school is to give him a 
good start. 

I beg, too, for a reform in the idea that a course is 
framed mainly for the one who graduates. If the voca- 
tional and the non-vocational are properly paralleled, the 
course is good from whatever point it is left, and whenever 
or wherever abandoned it has taught the student the proper 
balance between industry and life ; between the means and 
the ends of existence. 

All this will take time, because it means to some extent 
the readjustment of ideals, the addition of new courses of 
study, and of new materials and methods of instruction. It 
means the making of a new class of teachers who must 
largely train themselves by a generation of experience. It 
means the making of a more complicated system of in- 
struction than has ever been undertaken — a system as 
complicated as American democratic life. 

But it is worth the while, for nothing better is possible. 
It is easier, of course, to short-circuit the matter by assent- 
ing to the separation of industry and education, but no 
race need hope for supremacy nor for the evolution of its 
best till it combines industry and education, which belong 
together in the schools as they do now and always must in 
life. 

So I say to the high schools — - Do not wait for approved 
courses of study, nor for the production of skilled teachers. 



THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL EDUCATION 77 

Go ahead and do the best you can. An honest effort is 
half the battle, and it is worth more now than it will ever 
be again. Do not hesitate till methods are marked out. 
If you do that, you and the cause are lost, for the separate 
industrial school will surely come. We know the ideal — 
an educated American in all the activities of life. Let us 
go ahead and produce him and mend our methods later on. 
Education is no longer a luxury. It has become a neces- 
sity for the doing of the world's work. It is no longer for 
the edification of the few ; it is for the satisfaction of the 
many; and whether we regard it as industrial or non-in- 
dustrial ; as contributing to the efficiency of men or to their 
elevation in civilized society ; however this or any other 
educational problem is regarded, they are all but phases 
of our general and stupendous problem of universal educa- 
tion, the best guide to whose solution is to teach in a unified 
system of schools all the things that the community needs 
to know, and let the individual take his choice concerning 
the vocational subjects. 



l^ 



CHAPTER IV 
THE EDUCATIVE VALUE OF LABOR 

The daily doing of needful things with regularity and efficiency 
is half of a liberal education. 

I YIELD the palm to none in my appreciation of what 
education can do for an individual, for a profession, and for 
a community, but in many respects we are school mad. 
Every child needs as much as he can get of the knowledge 
of the world and of the wisdom of the ancients to help him 
to meet the issues of life, but he needs also personal touch 
and experience with the world of to-day, that he may know 
how to meet and to deal with the world of to-morrow when 
he will be a man with maximum responsibilities. 

I have said that in our thirst for information we have 
become school mad. I say it because we undertake to 
absorb practically every moment of the time of the child in 
his academic work, most of it with books dealing either 
with ancient affairs or with abstract information which, 
good though it is, cannot constitute a sufficient preparation 
for a life in the present and with the concrete. When the 
high school girl must choose between her music and her 
high school course, then something is wrong, and the evi- 
dent remedy is to absorb less of her time in her studies, 
leaving time for music, or else to count the music as a part 
of her course. When she is so busy with her studies that 
she has no time to perform any part of the necessary labor 
of the home, then something is wrong, and the remedy is 

78 



THE EDUCATIVE VALUE OF LABOR 79 

to require less of her time in the school, or else to take 
household affairs into the course. 

If the schools as now organized could have their way 
with a boy, they would use all his time in the schoolroom 
and get him through the grades and the high school at 
seventeen or eighteen, then on into college for four years, 
with three more for a doctor's degree, expecting to turn 
him out at twenty-four or twenty-five an educated man. 

Educated in what ? Educated, no doubt, and highly so, 
in that world of knowledge which is sufficiently old and 
well-ordered to have found a place in books. Educated, 
too, perhaps, in methods of acquiring new knowledge by 
reading old literature from a new angle, or by a first-hand 
study of some great natural law or some little-known 
organism. 

All these things he may know and do, but as to that 
great moving, whirling mass of mind and matter that we 
call the world, where the concrete and the everlasting pres- 
ent are uppermost; where man rubs up against man — in 
this relation he is a child, with a child's outlook and with 
that queer combination of timidity and of ignorant assur- 
ance that mark the child's first contact with the world 
about him. Such is the penalty we pay for that form of 
education which is almost exclusively academic. 

Now the difficulty with this man is not that he knows 
too much. It is that he has experienced too little. It is 
not that he has lived too much in the past ; it is that he 
has not lived enough in the present. It is not that he is 
too familiar with the abstract, but it is that he has not dealt 
enough with the concrete. It is not that he is too adept 
at generalization ; it is that he is unfamiliar with the par- 
ticular. It is not that he knows too much of books ; it is 
that he knows too little of men. It is not that he knows 



8o EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

too much of the history of the race ; it is that he has not 
himself met and conquered the personal issues of life. 

What is it that such a man has really missed ? The 
answer can be framed in many terms. We may say that 
he has been taken out of his natural environment, and that 
is true. While other young men have been plowing and 
planting and reaping, buying and selling and building, he 
has been looking on and going to school. While others 
have been earning, he has been spending. While others 
have become independent and self-supporting, he has been 
dependent. While others have married and established 
families, he is unmarried or perhaps is being supported in 
college by the labor of his wife. While others have devel- 
oped in experience as in stature from children into men, 
he has remained undeveloped on the experience side — a 
man with the outlook of a child. What wonder that so 
many of our brightest young men scent this thing from 
afar and get out of the school at a deplorably early age ! 
What wonder that of those who remain so many conclude 
that after all it is better to go on learning than to begin 
doing and drift ultimately and necessarily into minor posi- 
tions. This is of special detriment to the teaching pro- 
fession, because of all men the teacher should have had 
much experience with the world. 

To realize still better what this man has lost who has 
lived inside the schoolroom till he was twenty-five, let us 
examine a little more in particular into the life of young 
men outside the schoolroom, with a view of better under- 
standing the educative value of that form of work which 
we call labor. The boy on the farm, for example, is told 
that it is his job to feed the pigs, and he knows by this 
that if he neglects or shirks the duty the pigs will tell of it 
and he will be called to account. There will be no ques- 



THE EDUCATIVE VALUE OF LABOR 8l 

tion of a " passing grade " or a " conditioned examination." 
There is no way to partly do the job, nor can he escape by 
cribbing. The only crib in the case is the corn crib, and 
to this he must go, not once or even twice, but daily and 
regularly, for the pigs will tell on him every time he shirks, 
for no " point of honor " is involved with them. To the 
teacher who has had this experience in boyhood the cheap 
excuses and the petty deceptions so often indulged in by 
the schoolboy to avoid meeting squarely the issue of daily 
duties, to him the contrast is keen, and to him is laid bare 
the fatal defect in attempting to educate solely by the 
schoolroom method. 

When these pigs are ready for market, the boy will see 
them sold, and if the father is what he should be, one of 
them belongs to the boy, and so will the proceeds thereof. 
Now this is a better way of getting money than to run 
errands or to have an allowance, because the process is 
natural and highly educative. All this is the experience 
of a boy on the farm before he is twelve years old, and I 
know many a boy who is buying and selling and dealing 
with men in standard values by the time he is fourteen. 

This boy, if he is good for anything, will never rest well 
o' nights till he has harnessed a horse — for did he not 
break a yoke of calves of his own ? — and he is never com- 
pletely happy till he has driven a double team. Perhaps 
there is no development in a boy when for the first time he 
handles the lines and directs the energies of somewhere 
from a ton and a half to two tons of horse flesh ! I know 
by experience as well as by observation that he is about 
six inches taller afterwards, and I believe he has grown 
more inside than he has grown outside. This boy soon 
"makes a hand "; that is, does a man's work, and I want 
to say that not again until his wedding day will this boy be 



82 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

SO happy and so consequential as when for the first time 
he is recognized as taking a man's place in the world. 
Soon after this the girls begin to call him mister, and then 
his cup of satisfaction is completely filled. After that he 
is a man. 

Is all this trivial and unimportant .'' It is involved, I tell 
you, in the making of a man, and some time, somewhere, 
this experience must come, or the boy will never be a real 
man; for, like the young thing of any other species, the 
boy must test his environment day by day, and grow in 
strength and experience as that environment broadens. 

The daily doing of needful things with regularity and 
efificiency is in itself highly educative. It constitutes a 
good and a necessary part of a liberal education, and with- 
out it no system of education is safe. It teaches, first of 
all, personal responsibility for things to be accomplished, 
whereby the child learns the useful lesson that things do 
not "just happen," neither do they "do themselves." 

The getting of results, often against obstacles, and the 
bringing about of what would not otherwise have come to 
pass, so that the child can say with satisfaction, " I did 
that" — this, too, is educative. It may only be finishing 
the planting before rain sets in perhaps for days ; it may 
be only the getting in of the last load of hay or grain be- 
fore the threatened storm ; it may be the breaking in of a 
spirited horse and the curbing of his nature to a superior 
will ; it may be the feeding off of a bunch of steers or 
even of pigs and their marketing — it may be only these 
things, but they are the things that men do, and if the boy 
can measure himself with men a part of the time, it is 
better than to measure himself with boys all of the time. 
The writer counts now as his most blessed privilege and 
the most valuable part of his early training the experience 



THE EDUCATIVE VALUE OF LABOR 83 

of an only son who planned and executed day by day for 
many years side by side with the father. The companion- 
ship of these two, boy and man, as they planned together 
to surmount their small difficulties, — small indeed, but 
they were the issues of life to them, — all this was, as I 
count it now, the most truly valuable part of my prepa- 
ration for life. Such an experience cannot be compared 
with what is learned from books. The two are different. 
The important point is that neither can replace the other^ 
and both are necessary. 

When we take a boy out of his family life, off the farm 
or out of the shop, and absorb all of his time in the school- 
room, we owe him something in compensation. Do we 
say that manual labor is depressing, and that it tends to 
produce dullness and stolidity } That is only when, it is 
abused. That is only when there is too much of it. That 
is only when it is unaccompanied by intelligent plan and 
purpose. That is only when, year after year, the same dull 
routine of toil is endured as a necessity of existence, with 
no high purpose and no ray of hope ahead. 

But to the child manual effort is easy, yes, instinctive. 
It is for this reason highly stimulating and therefore edu- 
cative. V^hen a new thing is done well for the first time 
by the young, a sense of achievement and growing power 
possesses the doer, and manual accomplishments are among 
the earliest of possible achievements. 

I cannot, therefore, overrate the educational value of 
manual operations, particularly as they develop into pro- 
ductive labor with financial recompense. A boy sets out 
to make a box. It only means the nailing together of five 
pieces of board, with a sixth for a cover. It seems simple, 
but trial shows that the boards must all be square, or the 
box will gap at the joints; and the attempt proves the 



84 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

problem not so simple as it looks. The box does gap at 
the corners. It gaps badly, and the boy realizes what he 
would not have believed before — how difficult it is, after 
all, to saw off a board so that all the angles are right 
angles. If he tries twenty times before he succeeds, what 
matter .'' Only a little lumber and a few nails are wasted, 
but the boy is saved, for he has learned how easy is failure, 
and how difficult is success, even in so simple a matter as 
making a box. He has had the experience of failure, of 
repeated trial, and of ultimate success. Such a boy will 
never be discouraged later on by ordinary difficulty, be- 
cause he has had the experience of winning over failure. 
The boy who has not had this experience till he begins 
business as a man will not know how to take the unex- 
pected difficulties that beset what would seem to be the 
simplest case. It is better that the boy get this experience 
at the expense of a little lumber and a few nails while yet 
a child than at his personal cost when he gets to be a man, 
and is experimenting with himself and not with a box. 

I know of no way either in which a just appreciation of 
money values can be so well indoctrinated as when the boy 
as a child earns some money by means of labor, as most 
men must earn it all their lives. Now, the need of learn- 
ing the value of a dollar in terms of hours of labor and 
drops of sweat is as incumbent on the child of the rich as 
on the child of the poor ; and public safety demands that 
they both learn it early in life. If this nation ever goes to 
ruin, it will be from inefficiency and unbridled extrava- 
gance, with the corruption which so surely attends upon 
non-constructive existence. 

As a means of giving early experience with failure fol- 
lowed by success after repeated trial ; as a means of teach- 
ing personal initiative and constructive activity; as a 



THE EDUCATIVE VALUE OF LABOR 85 

means of teaching the money value of effort and the en- 
ergy value of money, I must unhesitatingly recommend a 
course in that kind of work commonly denominated labor, 
and inasmuch as labor cannot replace learning, I must 
earnestly urge the closest possible joining of the two. 

I would not, therefore, take a child out of his home envi- 
ronment and compel him to spend all his time in mental 
effort with academic lines of work any more than I would 
confine him to labor with no chance at that larger world of 
knowledge and experience which is mostly recorded in 
books. I would have him do both in order that he may 
grow somewhat naturally into the environment of men and 
things of his own time, and also be informed as to what 
other men and other times have to teach. 

Accordingly, I propose that one fourth of the time of 
our school children be devoted to something distinctly vo- 
cational, and the nearer it is to manual labor the better, as 
I see it. In any event, I would have it deal with the or- 
dinary things of life, not in a dilettante way, but in genuine 
fashion as men deal with the same things in the way of 
business. Is one fourth of the time too much to devote 
to this business of growing a boy in his environment, and 
what I am saying of boys is intended also to be said of 
girls, and to apply to alL children who attend the public 
schools ? 

Private schools may run upon their own plan, but we 
cannot afford the consequences of a public school system 
of universal education that does not recognize the funda- 
mental and substantial value of education in terms of in- 
dustrial activity as well as in terms of the widest knowledge 
and the highest culture. 

It is highly important that we never lose sight of our 
real problem of education. It is to fit a generation of 




86 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

young people to live a life not like that of Babylon or 
Egypt, or even Greece and Rome ; not like that of Western 
Europe; not like that of ours in America to-day, but a 
life such as has never been lived anywhere on earth since 
the world began. The average child that is born to-day 
will live his active life from 1930 to i960 or 1970 or even 
later. 

Before that time comes, conditions here will be greatly 
changed. Moreover, there will be new conditions on the 
earth. Population has doubled thus far in America once 
every twenty-five years. If that ratio keeps on, we shall 
double our population before the children in school to-day 
get well started in active life. Think what industrial, 
economic, and social changes are involved therein, raising 
issues that they, not we, must meet and for which our pres- 
ent-day schooling, I apprehend, is none too well adapted. 
If the normal rate of increase continues, we should have 
180 millions of people in 1935 ; 360 millions in i960; 720 
millions in 1985, and 1440 millions in 2010. 

Manifestly, this normal rate of increase cannot continue 
another hundred years, dii^ something will happen in its 
checking, and the childre^i that we are educating will be 
there when it begins to happen. Are we schooling them so 
as to be ready to meet these issues } I fear not. 

Accordingly, I would not educate them less in the world's 
past or in whatever useful knowledge has been learned, be- 
cause they will need that knowledge for guidance in meet- 
ing new and difficult issues, but I would educate them more 
in terms of the present and in the way of personal and in- 
dependent initiative, and above all in the methods whereby 
the individual takes his place among men and becomes at 
once andivith certai^ity a self-supporting member of society. 
The proper blending of these two forms of education is 



THE EDUCATIVE VALUE OF LABOR 87 

necessary to efficiency ; moreover, it is the way to prolong 
the school period and keep the boy in school. 

I repeat, therefore, my firm conviction that a fourth of 
the time of the child in school up to the level of the col- 
lege should be given to vocational work. Is the objection 
raised that there is no time } Why not ? there is all the 
time there is. The objector is thinking about that sacred 
four years' high school course and the customary passing 
up through the grades to reach it. He is thinking about 
graduation. I say, never mind graduation, but look out 
for the boy and preserve a proper balance in the material 
and the processes employed for his educational develop- 
ment. We get our children through the high school too 
early now. It were better to take more time. 

It has been assumed in the educational world that vo- 
cational training is college work to be undertaken after 
graduation from high school, and some would say after a 
non-vocational undergraduate course. Now, manifestly, 
this must apply, if at all, to leaders in highly specialized 
callings. It cannot apply to the rank and file nor to ordi- 
nary occupations because most men do not and never will 
go to college. Most men do not, but most men might, 
attend high school, though few will graduate, whatever 
the conditions of graduation may be. I am thinking more 
about those who attend and the conditions of attendance 
than I am thinking of the conditions of graduation and of 
those who graduate, for they will adjust themselves, whether 
graduation takes four years or five years, and whether and on 
whatever terms they enter college. What they study and 
do, day by day, is of vastly more import than when or how 
they graduate or whether they graduate at all. 

That is why I would not take a child entirely out of his 
environment to school him. That is why I would not 



A 



88 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

make the acquisition of information the sole business of 
childhood. That is why I would say that from the first 
day of school till the last, one fourth of the student's time 
should be devoted to the vocational. 

Having done this as a condition of attendance, the con- 
ditions of graduation can be modified so as to give credit 
for the vocational, or the time can be extended to five 
years, if graduation is to be based only on academic work. 
I care little about that, but I care everything for the prin- 
ciple and the practice of uniting by the closest possible 
educational bonds, day by day and every day, the vocational 
and the non-vocational. 

When we come to do this, then will the individual be 
able to take his place among men because he has had the 
experience of men. Whether he graduates or whether he 
does not graduate — whenever he leaves the school, if this 
be the plan of our schooling process, he will have some 
education of the head with some initiative of the body, 
with some promise of at least fair efficiency, with a little 
knowledge that is beyond his own horizon. 

It is a sacrifice for the individual and a distinct loss to 
the state that so many children feel obliged or are com- 
pelled by their parents to leave school and earn money to 
support themselves and perhaps other members of the 
family. It has, however, its compensations, and I would 
mitigate its evil as far as may be by taking over much of 
this work into the educational field and giving for it sub- 
stantial credit in the fraction that I have indicated as being 
properly devoted to the vocational. 

Does the boy spend his summer and his mornings and 
his evenings on the farm ? Then let him report on what 
he does there ; whether he helps to carry the work and 
business forward, or whether he idles the time away. If 



•. 



THE EDUCATIVE VALUE OF LABOR 89 

the former, he is entitled to credit for one of the most 
valuable components of his education ; if the latter, then 
let the school set him at something useful, something tend- 
ing toward the vocational, that no boy may acquire knowl- 
edge without thought of its utilization. 

Does a boy sell papers after school? Why should not 
that fact be officially known and recognized as a factor in 
his education ? Why should he not report upon it regu- 
larly — the number and kinds of papers sold, the place and 
the customers, whether regular or special, cost and profit, 
together with the disposition of the proceeds ? 

No child of school age should be permitted to spend all 
the day in the factory. Some portion of the day should be 
devoted to academic training, but surely the discipline and 
experiences of the factory have educational value, and it 
is to the advantage of the public that the various activities 
in which children engage should be assessed by the schools 
and their relative educational value ascertained. 

Is all this shocking to our educational sensibilities? 
Does it smack too much of the practical, of the commercial, 
and of the ordinary ? Is it too much a lowering of stand- 
ards ? I beg the objector to remember that we are talking 
about the public school and a system of universal education, 
whereby the masses are to get their only preparation tor 
life and the trend that will fix their outlook forever. 



CHAPTER V 
THE CULTURE AIM IN EDUCATION 

To put thought into our work and work into our thought; to 
idealize existence and to preserve these ideals in everyday life — 
this, too, is culture. 

S AM exceedingly anxious not to be misunderstood with 
respect to that phase of education which we call culture, 
particularly that form of culture which has had in the past 
and is likely to have in the future its highest realization 
through the study of literary and philosophical subjects. 
All this I would preserve in the education of all classes of 
people. 

It is the special purpose of these pages to emphasize a 
high degree of personal efficiency as a major aim in educa- 
tion, even if that efficiency is to be exhibited along indus- 
trial lines, and yet I have no sympathy whatever with any 
scheme of education that would neglect, much less elimi- 
nate, every time-honored subject or educational ideal that 
cannot demonstrate its direct and immediate application to 
utilitarian ends. 

There is education, even culture, in technical training 
properly undertaken, but any attempt to secure industrial 
efficiency by the sacrifice of cultural subjects will defeat its 
own ends. If in the past we have made the mistake of 
assuming that a system of education aiming chiefly at 
culture would also secure efficiency, that is no reason for 
now driving to the other extreme and discarding the culture 

90 



THE CULTURE AIM IN EDUCATION 91 

aim entirely, by confining our attention exclusively to the 
so-called practical. While I would give to the individual 
large liberty of choice, I would teach to all classes of people 
all forms of human knowledge, both those that lead to 
immediate results and those that appeal strongly to the 
intellect, regardless of professional ends, and that is why, 
as in the next chapter, I have argued for that unity in 
education which would neglect nothing that is really valu- 
able to our civilization in the education of the masses of 
the people. 

Not that all will react equally to the culture phase of 
education, because they will not. Some fail to react even 
when possessed of personal ambition to excel, just as many 
a man with no voice essays to sing, to the huge satisfaction 
of his own unattuned ears and to the torture of all who 
hear him. Even this is laudable in the effort, and the ad- 
vantage to the performer is doubtless worth all it costs to 
the auditor. 

But some will react, for this reaction to the highest in- 
tellectual conceptions is a personal matter quite independ- 
ent of occupation or surroundings, and we may have, if we 
will, farmers and mechanics and industrial people generally 
in large numbers who appreciate as well as any other class 
of people the highest mental processes of which mankind 
is capable. 

A great sculptor found, quite by accident, a little boy 
molding images at the mouth of an Illinois coal mine. He 
took him to his studio, and this miner's son is now one of 
the world's greatest masters in molding children's features 
in clay. Here was a genius born among the masses. 

If only the education of industrial people be rightly bal- 
anced and the world of culture be opened to their vision, 
then will their leisure hours be made profitable, for there 



X 



92 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

is nothing about labor or even about common things that 
makes impossible the loftiest intellectual achievements. 

It was the shepherds on the Judean hills that evolved 
the highest conception of existence and of God that has 
ever been announced, — all as they watched their flocks 
under the starry skies and wondered at the mystery of life ; 
all in the leisure moments of their needful employment. 

There is another form of culture, however, that I desire 
especially to emphasize, and that is the intellectual devel- 
opment that comes to the individual as the direct result of 
doing extremely well whatever is undertaken, even though 
it be the most common things of everyday life. It is the 
doing of common things in shiftless ways, through dire 
necessity, under mental protest and with intellectual stag- 
nation — this is what degrades ; this is the degradation of 
labor ; and it is inevitable to the uneducated and unskilled 
who regard labor only as a disagreeable necessity to be 
avoided if and whenever possible. 

But to him who looks upon labor as an opportunity to 
achieve results; to him who sees the end from the begin- 
ning and labors to realize his ideal; to him who sees the 
results of his achievement as a part of a harmonious whole ; 
to him who develops the thing he does until it discloses its 
proportions and perhaps its beauty — to him labor is ele- 
vating and the products of his labor are cultural. 

The farmer who produces the finest horse that ever trod 
the turf could not do it unless he saw a mental picture in ad- 
vance and dreamed a vision of what he would produce gen- 
erations before he found and brought together the material 
that would produce it. Is not this art as high as that which 
puts the picture on the canvas after the farmer had pro- 
duced the original as a living expression of his own dream ? 
Yea, verily, and if we are to have fine horses, we must first 



THE CULTURE AIM IN EDUCATION 93 

have farmer artists to produce them, for, look you, the 
horse existed before the painter ever put him on the can- 
vas. The original was first of all in the breeder's mind a 
mental vision. Yes, if we are to have great things, then 
men of every occupation must dream dreams. 

Here is a pile of soiled and crumpled linen, — a most for- 
bidding prospect. Who shall bring back again the beauty 
of pattern and design that are now obliterated .'' Not the 
menial, surely, who sees only the tumbled pile of dirty 
lace. It will be the artist, either born or trained, who has 
faith in the prospect and who sees through it all the, pic- 
ture that was in the mind of the designer of the patterns 
on which the lacemaker and the weaver wrought. This 
person, with results in mind in advance, by processes well 
understood, removes the filth of the street, and by cunning 
method brings out again the pattern and restores the pic- 
ture, just as the sculptor chips away the outside stone that 
the statue within may appear. Is this menial employment.? 
Well, if it is, it can never be performed by a menial, be- 
cause no such person can appreciate the possibilities; 
hence much bad sewing and worse cooking ; hence clean- 
ing that does not clean, hence disease, unhappiness, and 
death with its trail of wasted racial resources. 

Nor would I have my reader overlook the fact that 
the culture that comes from doing in the best way possible 
the everyday and common things of life is the best prepa- 
ration possible for an appreciation of that other culture 
that is purely intellectual, but which can never be properly 
appreciated except by him who creates, who produces in 
some fashion or other the expression of an ideal, whether 
the ideal be a picture upon canvas or in stone ; or whether 
it be upon the landscape in the figure of beautiful trees and 
flowers or of bountiful crops ; whether the ideal be teeming 



94 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

thoughts in words that will never die, or whether it be in 
the flesh and blood of an improved animal; whether it be 
in daily duty of a high and unusual order or of a common 
and ordinary kind, the individual must be an artist himself 
or his culture is only a veneer. 

To the writer, culture is the best expression of the high- 
est faculties of man, with considerable stress upon the 
word expirssion. I cannot see much culture in mere 
ravings upon the achievement of others or even in medi- 
tation upon lofty thoughts and purposes unless that medita- 
tion leads to action. 

Mere information is knowledge static, but the highest 
product of education is an informed and disciplined mind 
at work. So it seems to me that real culture, the only 
culture at least worth aiming at, is the highest possible 
exercise of the finest human faculties, working not for 
immediate and utilitarian ends, but for the best of which 
the man is capable. 

In an earlier chapter I alluded to the fact that the so- 
called industrial people are in possession of about all the 
real leisure of the race. This is not only because of their 
overwhelming numbers, but also from the fact that outside 
of working hours the relaxation of industrial people is more 
complete than is possible with those of any other class. 

If the time of this relaxation be not profitably employed, 
then it is the fault of the system of education by which the 
industrial people are prepared for life. There is nothing 
about ordinary employment that is degrading or that is 
adverse to the highest ideals ; on the contrary there is much 
that is of itself elevating and stimulating to the develop- 
ment of the very best that is in man, all of which will be 
evident to any one who takes the pains to study carefully 
the character and the personality of country people or those 



THE CULTURE AIM IN EDUCATION 95 

of any other industrial class that has had even a fair chance 
at education and a reasonable protection against over- 
whelming and wholesale influences tending to inevitable 
degradation. 

It is not at all uncommon to find great readers and 
great thinkers, even philosophers, among these people. 
They have the best opportunities for culture of any of 
us if only their education affords them a decent outlook 
upon the world, and somewhat broader than their earning 
powers. 

It is a mistake to assume that all the culture is in the 
dreamer's mind, or that it is unattainable by him who meets 
j fairly the world's demands. One of the things that is 

needed now is to put more of idealism into common things 
and more of culture into the common men, whom the Lord 
especially loveth as he made so many of them. 

The man that builds my house : shall he be merely a 
sawer off of boards and a nailer on of shingles, or shall he 
have and feel an intelligent sympathy with its architectural 
plan ? If he have that sympathy, he will feel it as he works, 
and he will unconsciously put it into his work, and we shall 
have the plan fully executed and the house will become a 
habitation full of human thought in its execution as well 
as in its design. If he does not feel that sympathy with 
the ideal of the architect, he cannot put the best into its 
execution, and the result will give the impression of an ideal 
badly realized and badly executed. The common man may 
not be able to originate and create, but if he is properly 
educated, he will feel the artistic thrill in execution, and 
both he and his work will be the better for it. This, too, 
is culture. 

Why should not and why may not a farmer be a student 
of language or of economics ? Why may he not be an 



g6 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

authority upon some particular period of ancient or modern 
history ? He has more leisure than any other large class of 
independent people. His occupation should not absorb, 
and indeed cannot absorb, all his time. Moreover, if he 
regards it rightly and is properly educated for it, his farm- 
ing broadens him and does not narrow either his outlook 
or his mental capacity. 

Why should not the craftsman generally live a part of 
his time in a world other than the one wherein and whereby 
he earns his bread ? If he does, two things will happen : 
first, he will be a better and a safer man ; second, he will 
drive his business more successfully and his craftsmanship 
will be of a higher order. 

All this I concede and most thoroughly believe. The 
great fault and failing in our education is that we have 
foolishly assumed that education for culture's sake would 
necessarily and mechanically secure efficiency, and when it 
did not, we have again foolishly and hastily assumed that 
there is something about industrial activity that is antago- 
nistic if not fatal to culture. So we have surrendered the 
industrial people as such to a hard life of toil, barren of 
the better things of life, hoping only to deliver as many as 
possible from their fate as brands snatched from the burn- 
ing. Refusing to be delivered over in this way, the indus- 
trial people are proceeding to set up a system of education 
of their own over against the old, with the very natural 
but fatal defect of sneering at culture, surrendering every- 
thing to present needs. 

It is for educators to come to the rescue and put some- 
thing of culture into industrial training or else to graft 
industrial education upon our school system, producing a 
kind of education adapted to turn out people that are both 
efficient and cultured. 



THE CULTURE AIM IN EDUCATION 97 

Of these two possible procedures the author regards the 
latter as in every way preferable for reasons that will be 
more fully stated in the chapter on Educational Unity, and 
hence it is that these pages are addressed to those of the 
old school, hoping to induce the most experienced educa- 
tors to have more regard for efficiency and thereby adapt 
our present system of education to the needs of the indus- 
trial masses. If these pages were addressed to the indus- 
trial people in the hope of influencing the education that 
they would of themselves build up, then, under such con- 
ditions, I should attempt to attain the same ends by laying 
stress upon the need and value of culture, not as the whole 
but as an essential ingredient of the mixture that we call 
the educational course. Thus I should emphasize the 
weakest spot in either system, as I am now doing here. 

I know a small city with great clay-working interests 
within its borders. The call is sharp for men sufficiently 
skilled to turn out crocks and jugs, and the best boys are 
eager for the time when they, too, can go into "the works" 
to earn money like men. They will even leave the school 
in order to do it. What wonder when the school is as silent 
<fn all matters of clay working as if the factory and its in- 
terests were a thousand miles away ! Now if the school 
should recognize the facts of the community life and teach 
something of ceramics, even ever so little, the inevitable 
consequence would be : — 

1. An improvement in the quality of crocks and jugs in 
the factory. 

2. An improvement in the men that earn their living by 
making crocks and jugs through a higher and more intelli- 
gent purpose and through association with a more artistic 
product. 

3. If a clay-working genius is ever born into that com- 

/ 



gS EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

munity, — and he will be sometime, — then he will promptly 
be discovered and will arise to enrich the world of art and 
not be lost to his generation and to time in the shape of 
a genius making jugs. 

If in addition to all this the clay be found to be truly 
superior, then in all likelihood there would develop in time 
a ceramics department in the local school and the little city 
become known the world over like Limoges for its beauti- 
ful as well as its useful product. 

If the masses of people as they labor, think and also 
dream, and if they think and dream about their labor, then 
will their labor be uplifted ; then will the common things 
of life be beautified, and after we have learned to beautify 
the concrete that is all about us, then shall we know how 
to spiritualize the ideal and the abstract that is within us 
through literature, philosophy, and religion. 

The readiest avenue to culture is by way of the common 
things well done, and the masses of men should find in 
their daily duties the means of their own uplift. Culture 
and refinement are not for the few, they are for the many ; 
and the road to their achievement must not be made nar- 
dow or unduly tortuous. 

The human animal is what he is because of his inherent 
tendency upward, a tendency that is not the peculiar prop- 
erty of a favored few, but the common possession of the 
mass of the race; for our race, like all others, owes its 
progress not to the few but to the many. 

I invite the reader to let his mind dwell upon the ultimate 
consequences of two different educational policies regard- 
ing this matter of culture : — 

I. A policy in which the masses of men are unendowed 
with the opportunity of idealizing beyond the day and its 
duties as a means or maintaining existence. What is the 



THE CULTURE AIM IN EDUCATION 99 

consequence, first, to them as individuals, second, to the state, 
when we know that one third of their working hours are em- 
ployed neither in labor nor in means of self -improvement ? 

2. Over against this a policy of education that recognizes 
that a man should be a skilled workman ; first, in order 
that he may be sure of a livelihood, and second, that the 
world may be well provided with needful things ; but that 
also recognizes that the man himself is capable either of 
elevation or of degradation and that he has on his hands 
about one third of his time that will be devoted to one or 
the other, — a policy further that recognizes that the end and 
aim of existence is not to live but to develop man who is 
made in the image of God with a divinity that will assert 
itself if it can. 

With culture of this sort I am deeply sympathetic as I 
am out of sympathy with either extreme that would on the 
one hand sacrifice the man to his daily toil or on the other 
hand proceed upon the unjust assumption that culture is 
only for the few who by some fortunate circumstance or 
superior cunning are enabled to avoid and shirk their 
share of the world's work only because they have found a 
way to eat by the sweat of another's brow. 

So, culture is for the race ; for the man that God has 
made in his own image. And who are we to shape our 
policies of education upon the theory that all men are not 
created equal ? It is rather for us so to shape these policies 
that by the process of education every man may realize in 
his own personality the full measure of his capacity as en- 
dowed by the Creator and not as limited by man. 

With this I hope that the purpose of the writer will at 
least not be wholly misunderstood and we may pass to the 
more detailed consideration of what is involved in educa- 
tion for that kind of efficiency which fosters and does not 
sacrifice culture. 



CHAPTER VI 
UNITY IN EDUCATION! 

I would have it so that in a company of American citizens one 
cannot tell by the dress, the manners, or the speech what is the occu- 
pation of the individual. To this end let there be few schools with 
many courses, not many schools with few courses. 

No fact in the educational situation is clearer than this 
and none is more significant : Industrial education is com- 
ing into its own and it is here to stay. The ninety-five per 
cent are to be educated and educated in terms of their own 
activities. This means a well-defined system of education 
in some form, designed and administered for the good of 
the industrial masses, and of all other classes as well. If 
this cannot be accomplished, then each will suffer separately 
and all will suffer together. 

There is a system of college education designed for the 
development of the industries and the benefit of industrial 
people, but there is no system of secondary education so 
designed, except that here and there a few feeble attempts 
have been made, sometimes in connection with existing 
schools, sometimes separately. 

The existing system of secondary schools, though univer- 
sal in its invitation to students, is built upon old-line poHcies 
of restricted human interests. They cannot by these 
policies appeal to the masses because they ignore the im- 
mediate and personal interests of the common man. If 
any man is to be educated, that education must touch him 

1 See also address at the N. E. A., Denver, July 8, 1909. 

100 



UNITY IN EDUCATION loi 

first of all at the point of his daily activities — in general 
his occupation; and in order to reach the industrial people 
as such we must have a form of education designed for 
them and with special reference to the industries upon 
which they depend for their existence. 

This can be attained in two distinctly different ways : it 
can be attained by broadening the existing system to include 
the industries and the interests and needs of industrial peo- 
ple ; or it can be accomplished by a separate system of 
schools. Either road is open now, but both roads will not 
be open long. 

If the former alternative is to be taken, the academic 
people must take the lead, and they must do it now, for the 
industrial people are exhibiting numerous signs of a dis- 
position to take the matter into their own hands. If they 
do that, they will establish separate schools of industry in 
which they will be encouraged by certain educators, and 
we shall have the spectacle of the ninety-five per cent se- 
ceding from the five per cent; driven out, not by numbers 
but by tradition, to the great disadvantage of both parties, 
and the ultimate sacrifice of a large body of knowledge 
that ought to come into the possession and enrich the lives 
of the masses of men of all occupations. 

So readily and completely can the highly specialized in- 
dustrial sphool meet the immediate needs of industrial peo- 
ple, and so seemingly complicated is the problem for the 
existing secondary school to expand and take in the indus- 
tries, that it is worth while to consider somewhat in detail 
the ultimate consequences of the separate school, particu- 
larly with respect to agriculture, with which the writer is 
most at home, confidently believing that what is true of 
agriculture and her people is in general true of the other 
industries and their people. 



102 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

Careful consideration of this matter at this time is the 
more fitting in view of the fact that federal legislation is 
proposed, whereby there should be in every ten counties of 
each state (not more than fifteen or less than five) ^ an agri- 
cultural high school in which should be taught agriculture 
and domestic science. 

Now while I have devoted my life to agriculture and am 
a partisan advocate of industrial education, yet I am a firm 
believer in the theory that the purpose of all education of every 
kind is efficiency — efficiency in something — in anything that 
will contribute to the sustenance, the development, or the 
happiness of man, and I can see no good and sufificient 
reason why a system aiming at a particular kind of 
eflficiency should be cut off and separated from other sys- 
tems aiming at other forms of efficiency, particularly when 
human life is enriched in proportion to its capacity for 
achievement and enjoyment. On the contrary, I can see 
many reasons why such a separation is not only unnecessary 
and undesirable, but altogether inadvisable and even dan- 
gerous. Among the many reasons that might be given I 
hastily and but imperfectly sketch the following, with spe- 
cial reference to agriculture and country people : — 

I . Separate schools can never be so good as larger schools 
with separate courses, ministering to a variety of people. 
This is axiomatic for both economic and pedagogic reasons. 
No school designed to minister to a single class of people 
and to a single group of interests can ever be so well 
equipped in the fundamental arts and sciences — in chem- 
istry, biology, physics, history, literature, economics, and 
the so-called humanities generally — no such school can be 
so well equipped as can one designed to minister broadly 
to a variety of interests. Indeed, even if the attempt is 

1 See draft of the so-called Davis Bill. 



UNITY IN EDUCATION 103 

made and a wide range of subjects taught, these same sub- 
jects will of necessity be studied and taught from a com- 
paratively narrow standpoint. 

Every teacher knows and every investigator knows that 
in order to develop a subject well, either for purposes of 
instruction or of research, it is necessary to establish and 
maintain a favorable atmosphere for that particular field of 
mental activity, and this atmosphere is at its best only in 
the presence of students interested mainly in that subject ; 
that is to say, there is no more favorable place in which the 
farmer may study chemistry than in company with others, 
not merely of his own kind but of those who believe that 
chemistry is the greatest thing on earth. 

There is no better place for the farmer to study history 
and to learn to see himself as others see him than where 
he studies history in company with those whose chief in- 
terest is not in agriculture or in engineering or in teaching, 
but rather in history itself, by which we study the true 
significance of world movements of all classes, and come to 
know things past and present in their true perspective. 
That is to say, every man ought to be educated in an at- 
mosphere not especially prepared for him and his own kind, 
but in an atmosphere and an environment much broader 
than his own interests. In this country, if our democratic 
institutions are to be preserved, and if our people are to 
labor together in peace and understanding, all classes must 
be educated in an atmosphere at least as liberal and as 
broad as all the interests of any single community can 
make it. 

In saying this, I do not overlook the fact that the sepa- 
rate agricultural school has certain distinct advantages. 
They are the same advantages that are enjoyed by any 
other industrial school, or even a theological seminary, 



I04 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

arising from the comparative simplicity of the educational 
contract they undertake. It is a fact, of course, that any 
school founded, manned, and equipped to do a single thing | 

and minister to a single interest gains much in directness 
by its simplified problem, and by the direct methods it 
naturally employs. But it loses in breadth and relative 
value, as has been indicated, and the best proof of it is that 
none of the separate schools yet founded offer as much even 
in science as the near-by high schools ; and what they achieve 
in the end is industrial training rather than industrial edu- 
cation — the training of the operative rather than the 
education of the citizen. 

Sir James Bryce tells us that the chief purpose in studying 
history is to throw light upon our present action and future 
policies, because in a large sense history does repeat itself. 
In this connection it is well to remind ourselves that agri- 
cultural and mechanical education started in this country in 
separate colleges. This was necessary because of the at- 
titude of old-line colleges of that day concerning industrial 
education. But that attitude has entirely changed, and 
to-day these two fundamental industries are strongest, both 
in instruction and research — not in the separate agricul- 
tural and mechanical colleges, but in our greatest universi- 
ties, where all forms of education are imparted, and where 
American energy and American citizenship are trained in 
a cosmopolitan atmosphere. Not only is this true, but the 
proportion of agricultural students who return to the farm 
is greater from our universities than from our separate ag- 
ricultural colleges, to say nothing of the masses of city 
boys directed countryward. 

So I return to my first assertion, viz.: that both from the 
nature of the case and from the experience of the past we 
may fairly conclude that separate schools are inferior 



UNITY IN EDUCATION 105 

schools ; that they lose more in breadth than they gain in 
directness, and can never rank in real service with that 
other type which ministers to many interests and gains 
directness by its distinctly separate courses. 

2. Separate schools will tend strongly to peasantize the 
farmers. To undertake to train the children of farmers in 
a system of inferior schools, such as these must inevitably 
be, with little knowledge of and less regard for the affairs 
of other people ■ — such an attempt, if it succeeds, will 
peasantize the farmers in America more rapidly and more 
certainly than they were peasantized by other causes in 
Europe generations ago. 

To segregate any class of people from the common 
mass, and to educate it by itself and solely with reference 
to its own affairs, is to make it narrower and more bigoted, 
generation by generation. It is to substitute training for 
education and to breed distrust and hatred in the body 
politic. Knowledge is necessary to a just appreciation of 
other people and their professions and mode of life ; with 
this only can a man respect his own calling as he ought 
and love his neighbor as he should. We cannot segregate 
and make an educational cleavage at the line of occupations, 
except to the common peril. 

We may one day need the real trade school in agricul- 
ture — the form of instruction that aims at training rather 
than education ; at information rather than development ; 
at mediocrity and below rather than mediocrity and above. 
This time may come, but it is not here now, and our great- 
est present need in agriculture is to educate the landown- 
ers rather than their hired operatives ; to educate a class 
of people upon the land that are in every way the equal 
of their compatriots in the city or anywhere else. 

The European peasant belongs to a class whose eco- 



I 



io6 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

nomic and social status was fixed generations ago by a 
variety of causes, mostly political ; and when the problem 
of universal education came up for solution there, the 
only way in which the benefits of education could be ap- 
proximately enjoyed by all the people was to found a 
system of peasant schools which should secure results 
with a maximum of manual training and a minimum of 
mental education. How difficult of achievement was even 
this step will be appreciated, for example, by any student 
of Irish industrial history, or by any one who has read Sir 
Horace Plunkett's '' Ireland in the New Century." 

When these times come to this country, if they ever do, 
I fervently hope that by that time our secondary schools 
will have become so well organized and so broadly equipped 
as to handle the trade school together with that higher 
form of industrial education which now engages our atten- 
tion and which we are trying now to provide. 

The American farmer is not a peasant. He has never 
yet been peasantized, and I fervently hope he never will 
be peasantized. He belongs mostly to the ancient and 
honorable Puritan stock descended from that great middle 
class of England that came to this country to establish and 
maintain, not aristocratic, but democratic, institutions. 
This is the stock that first felled trees, then built churches 
and schoolhouses, and prepared to govern themselves and 
to found a nation and a race whose institutions should rest 
on the intelligent activity of all the people. 

This stock has never been exceeded, not only for hardi- 
hood and industry, but for its appreciation of the benefits 
of higher education and of the better things of life. This 
people held three things to be cardinal virtues — to labor, 
to go to church, and to go to school. This is the people 
that founded Harvard College in the wilderness. It is 



UNITY IN EDUCATION 107 

from stock of this sort that the typical American farmer 
is descended, and I would see him so trained and so edu- 
cated as to remain true to his type for all time. This will 
require a training and an education that cannot be imparted 
by any form of European peasant school, however modified, 
but it will require the best that modern human ingenuity 
can devise. This great need will be met, if it is ever met, 
not by old, but by new systems of education, and they 
must be wrought out by ourselves to meet conditions here. 

3. To educate the children of different classes separately 
is to prevent that natural flow of individuals from one pro- 
fession into another which is in every way desirable both 
for public and for private welfare. If the children of 
farmers are systematically put into schools where only 
agriculture is taught, many a good lawyer and many a 
good citizen will be spoiled to make an indifferent farmer. 
Boys do not necessarily inherit the father's profession. In 
a very large sense their natural faculties come from that 
common stock of human characters that constitute the 
heritage of the race, and the individual has a right to an 
education that is broader than the occupation and the nar- 
row environment in which he was born. True, he should 
be educated through and to a large extent by means of his 
environment, because that is the compass of his own ex- 
perience ; but if we educate him within his environment, 
we dwarf him in the process, and we do not truly educate 
him. 

Again, many a boy, city born, has the instinct to get 
back to Nature. He should have at least a fair chance to 
do so. Because a girl is born in the country is no sign in 
America that she should be a farmer's wife ; nor if she is 
born in the city, is it a sign that she should not. My plea 
is, in the name of common sense and American citizenship, 




io8 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

educate all these people together in one school, with a 
curriculum varied enough to fit for more than one occupa- 
tion and more than one mode of life, to the end that a 
man may follow the occupation of his father or may change 
it, as he pleases; but whether he follow or whether he 
change, he shall do so intelligently, and for a reason, and 
in either case he shall have some knowledge of and sym- 
pathy with the occupation and the life of his neighbor. 

It is said that if you give a bright boy a good education 
and broad associations, he will leave the farm, and the 
only way to keep him there is to train him to be contented 
with a humble life. That false theory of education was 
exploded long ago. Experience has abundantly shown 
that education does not necessarily result in taking people 
out of the country except when that education is one-sided 
and faulty, as witness the graduates from some of our 
greatest universities. I have no sympathy with the plan 
of keeping boys on the farm by the blindfolding process. 

There was a time, now happily past, when the schools 
ignored not only agriculture but all industry. Then un- 
thinking teachers advised bright boys and girls to " get an 
education, so they would not have to work." This sort of 
doctrine found fertile soil in the young of hard-working, 
self-denying pioneers, and it was not strange that most 
young men who had much contact with the schools were 
lost not only to the farm but to industrial life. Then it 
was that men saw the best of the young crowding into pro- 
fessions already overcrowded, and they noted with sorrow 
and regret that education served principally to draw men 
away from the useful callings and to pile them up like 
salmon in the spawning season where they were not needed 
or wanted, and where little awaited but their own destruc- 
tion. 



UNITY IN EDUCATION 109 

The country is, and always will be, the great breeding 
ground for the nation, and the consequence of this insane 
movement cityward of the choicest men and minds could 
have had but one final effect — to put the brains in the 
city and the brawn in the country. It was not strange 
that under conditions such as these thinking men first 
denied higher education to their young because of its in- 
evitable consequences, and then came to demand a form 
of education that should really serve the needs of indus- 
trial people as well as those of professional people. In 
this way arose the separate industrial schools, but later 
experience has shown that one extreme is as bad as the 
O'ther — that industrial training without education is but 
little better than education without industry, and that both 
will inevitably result in a most unfortunate sorting process ; 
both alike will prevent that natural flow from one pro- 
fession or mode of life to another, so essential to meet 
the natural desires of individuals, and to secure that ho- 
mogeneity of population without which institutions such 
as ours are not long safe, or even possible. 

Though it is true that educators did not lead in the 
movement for industrial education, they were quick to see 
its significance, and to-day our greatest educators and our 
best teachers are the most earnest disciples of the doctrine 
that a system of universal education should fit for all the 
needful activities of a highly civiHzed race, to the neglect 
of none and to the prejudice of none. 

This is a stupendous problem. Think of its new com- 
plications ! In the old days all that was necessary was to 
maintain whatever schools could win support and teach 
the things most easily taught without much regard to the 
consequences. In these days of universal education we 
must teach what the world needs to know for all its essen- 



no EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

tial activities, and we must so conduct our schools as not 
to greatly disturb the economic or social balance of things ; 
so conduct them that the overflow from one occupation or 
class shall be naturally compensated by a corresponding 
inflow of equally desirable individuals from others — all of 
which is necessary if universal education is to be an un- 
mixed blessing. 

4. Secondary schools devoted solely to agriculture 
would of necessity cover so much territory as to require 
the students to board and room away from home. This 
for students of the high school age is unthinkable. Every 
boy and every girl in the early and middle " teens " should 
sleep every night under the father's roof, and this can be 
if a community establishes a single school capable of cater- 
ing to all its needs, and does not insist upon educating one 
class here and another there, compelling long journeys to 
get to the right school. A single agricultural school in 
ten counties, or in five counties, or in one county — think 
of it ! 

The problem of secondary education is largely the prob- 
lem of the fourteen-year-old, and we should never rest easy 
till every farmer's boy and girl may go to the nearest high 
school, and there find instruction not only in agriculture 
but in the other industries and professions which concern 
the community, and after having lived the day in an at- 
mosphere broader than their own studies go home again 
at night to dream of what a great thing the world is and 
to wake with an intelligent appreciation of the place in it 
which they propose to occupy, for its high school is the 
place in which the individual should "find himself." 

5. Agriculture not only needs contact with other inter- 
ests, but they need contact with agriculture. Every one 
who has had experience with the introduction of agricul- 



UNITY IN EDUCATION ill 

ture into our state universities will bear witness that the 
benefits of association are mutual. 

In the university which I have the honor to serve, our 
agricultural students not only get a training and a breadth 
of vision which they could never get in an institution de- 
voted solely to their own interests, but their presence on 
the campus is of distinct advantage to the other students. 
Their directness and their practical methods of work are 
wholesome to the institution, at least they are so declared 
by the non-agricultural professors and students alike. In 
every way, as I see it, much is lost and nothing gained by 
separating the students of different classes and educating 
them apart, each in the occupation of the father. 

Nor would I put all the so-called industries in one class 
of schools and the professions in another. In a large sense 
all study is professional, and in a very large sense indeed 
it is also industrial. Some portion of the training of every 
individual should be industrial, even manual, and another 
portion of the training of every individual should be dis- 
tinctly mental until habits of thought are formed quite 
independent of 7naterial activity. For these reasons, which 
are fundamental, I would not separate industry from any 
of our schools. I would make it an integral part of every 
curriculum, its proportion and character depending upon 
the prospective profession of the individual ; but above all 
I would have the essence of all occupations, or at least of 
as many as possible, represented in the same school. 

My point is, if all these subjects and professional points 
of view are offered in the same school with more than one 
avenue into life, then the opportunity is presented for the 
individual not only to make a choice but also to acquire 
professional knowledge and skill without becoming narrow 
as a man. If farmers and lawyers and editors and engi- 



112 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

neers and artists and merchants are educated separately, 
they will either hate or despise each other, or both ; if they 
are educated together, each will acquire, besides proficiency 
in his own line, a sympathy with others that comes so 
easily with that partial knowledge and acquaintance through 
daily association in the school age, and that comes with so 
much difficulty in any other way. A farmer being educated 
at a great university is a little different man because law 
and economics and engineering and Greek are well taught 
in neighboring buildings, even though he never take one 
of the courses laid down in the catalogue. The very fact 
that they are taught, and that he associates with those who 
take them — all this has its effect, and in a thousand ways 
a man absorbs something out of every activity that is going 
on about him. My point again is that this is the only ade- 
quate atmosphere in which to educate an American citizen, 
whatever his occupation is to be. 

6. To establish separate schools for agriculture is to 
injure the development of existing high schools. These 
schools are not "city schools" in any proper sense of the 
term. Most of them are located in small towns and vil- 
lages in a distinctly rural environment. To denominate 
all these as "city schools," to be devoted solely to the 
interests of city people, is as absurd as it is unjust to them. 
These schools, like all others, have the natural right to 
minister to their constituency, whatever it is. But if agri- 
culture is to be put off into a separate system of schools 
just because the high schools have not yet taught the sub- 
ject, it will be easy, later, to cleave off another industrial 
slice, and again another until the remnant that remains 
will be suited to nobody's need, unworthy alike of the 
school and the community it was established to serve ; 
and instead of an organized system of effective education 



UNITY IN EDUCATION 



"3 



we shall have an incongruous medley of separate and inde- 
pendent schools, each serving its little clientele in a narrow 
way without much regard to the public good — all of which 
is against the true spirit of universal education. 

The American high school is a new institution. It has 
arisen from our determination to make education truly uni- 
versal. Now, universal education means that all the peo- 
ple shall be educated, and in such a way that all the 
activities necessary to a highly civilized race may develop 
and go forward. Only a small per cent of the people will 
ever go to college and the experiment of universal education 
will be tried out in the field of the secondary schools. These, 
more than the colleges, will prove to be the agencies by 
which the masses of the people will get their training and 
their trend. For this reason the future welfare of these 
schools is to be specially safeguarded ; but every subject 
and interest that is taken away from the high school in 
the present stage of its development lessens by that much 
its power to serve the community, and by that much it is a 
menace to its life and efficiency and a check if not a bar to 
its further development. 

7. Separate schools in agriculture will check the exten- 
sion of high schools into country communities. High 
schools started first in the cities, it is true, but they are 
making their way rapidly out into the country, a tendency 
that is to be encouraged, more especially as they are 
showing a remarkable disposition to respond to their 
environment. If the interests are not divided, it is entirely 
possible for any community, without going beyond driving 
limits, to throw all its energies into a school of secondary 
grade and make it capable of truly reflecting all its varied 
interests. This has been found impossible where sec- 
ondary education is primarily under ecclesiastical in- 



114 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

fluence ; it will also be found impossible if interests are 
to be divided and as many separate schools established 
as there are interests to be served ; but if they will stay 
together and solve their problems as a unit, it is possible 
for every prosperous community to give its young people 
at their very doors what is to all intents and purposes a 
college education. 

8. It is unnecessary to found separate schools in order 
that agriculture shall be taught, and well taught. I am 
enough of a partisan for agriculture to demand what is 
needed for its development ; to advocate, if necessary, sepa- 
rate schools for this purpose, even if they should result in 
reducing the scope and curtailing forever the full and pos- 
sible development of the high school. But it is unneces- 
sary to resort to this expedient in these days. It was 
necessary to do so in an early day because of the in- 
different, not to say unfriendly, attitude of the schools of 
the time, all of which were organized and conducted on 
the classical basis in order to fit for the so-called learned 
professions. Such schools had little knowledge of and 
less sympathy with industrial education, and to get a start 
it was inevitable that separate schools should be estab- 
lished to do what existing schools would not in those days 
undertake. 

But conditions are changed. We are living now in a new 
age — in an age which recognizes that the highest purpose 
in education is to get ready to live ; that real education is 
active, not passive ; and that its fruitage is service, not per- 
sonal gratification. We are living in an age which recog- 
nizes that all forms of useful activity can be made yet 
more useful by the knowledge and the graces of educa- 
tion ; and that the man himself is bigger than his occupa- 
tion — bigger than that narrow avenue of public service 



UNITY IN EDUCATION 115 

through which he obtams his livelihood and discharges the 
ordinary debts to Nature. We have all learned this lesson, 
and by this time we ought to have learned it well. 

It is true that education for industrial people, and after 
that education in and for industry, arose from the masses 
and was forced upon the schools. I do not forget all this, 
but I beg to call attention to the fact that that early de- 
mand was a selfish one, — a righteous selfishness, it is true, 
but yet selfish. The masses wanted education for their 
own purposes, and it caused no little jolt to the educational 
juggernaut when they proceeded to get it. But when they 
had time to recover their breath, educators — real educa- 
tors — began to take stock of the situation, and they have 
commenced in these days a new policy of education in the 
world ; a policy which if followed out will develop all our 
resources, both industrial and intellectual ; a policy which 
will take care of your personal needs, and mine, and yet 
which is as broad as humanity and all its activities. This 
new policy is working successfully in our great state uni- 
versities where men of all classes, aims, and prospects are 
educated cogether from the standpoint not of private in- 
terest but of the public good. The same policy has com- 
menced its work in our secondary schools, and I am 
anxious above all other considerations that these schools 
should solve this whole problem for their communities ; 
besides, I know educators well enough to believe that they 
will earnestly undertake to do it if they are intrusted with 
the duty, which is also a privilege. 

These modern schools must have a fair chance. They 
are new institutions ; they have hardly been in the field a 
half century, and how they have grown ! There are liter- 
ally hundreds of them that are giving a better education 
than colleges gave a generation ago, and they have only 



Ii6 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

commenced to serve the people. If they have not yet 
solved all the problems and taught all the subjects the 
people need, it is no sign that they cannot or that 
they will not, and they should be given the chance. 
Every new addition to an educational institution not only 
serves a new public need, but it enriches all that was be- 
fore. All the modern secondary school needs in order 
to serve us perfectly is men and money and time to learn 
how. 

There is no longer an "issue" in education — certainly 
not concerning the fundamental industries. I am told that 
in certain remote sections of the country some people are 
still fighting the Civil War, but most of us know that it is 
over. The old issues are settled and dead and left behind. 
New ones have arisen to command our attention, and it is 
unworthy of ourselves to expend our energies on lines of 
effort long since rendered obsolete. 

Yes, the old issues between the classics and the indus- 
tries are dead and the sooner they are forgotten the better. 
I have been through this educational conflict myself and I 
know what it is ; but even the old soldier who insists upon 
fighting the Civil War over again, to-day, will get no audi- 
ence. New problems have arisen with the new generation, 
and this generation proposes to stand on whatever has 
been gained before and expend its energies in forward 
movements. We do well to imitate its example in this 
matter. The new issues are constructive. 

9. This demand that agriculture be taught in the public 
schools is but part of the great modern movement for indus- 
trial education. Whoever has lived close to the great heart 
of the common people and has had his hand upon the pulse 
cannot fail to have felt the throbbings of this new impulse 
for more than a generation, or to have detected its first 



UNITY IN EDUCATION 117 

feeble flutterings an hundred years ago. Whether he has 
had his ear to the ground or not, whether he has lived 
close to the heart of things or away in the upper atmos- 
phere, no man can now be ignorant of the great fact that 
a change is coming over the spirit of the times regarding 
educational ideals; a change that is fundamental, and 
whose shadow or whose light, whichever it may be, is full 
upon us and can no longer be averted or ignored. 

When each community had but one or two educated men, 
— the minister, the doctor, and perhaps the lawyer, — it did 
not greatly matter what their education might be like ; but 
when everybody learned to read, and to think, which was 
inevitable, they quickly saw that the system and the sub- 
ject-matter of an education suited to the office and the 
study were ill-adapted to fit men for the farm and the shop, 
but exceedingly well-adapted to unfit them. They, before 
the educators, learned that the benefits of education were 
capable of being extended to all the affairs of life, material 
as well as intellectual. 

But, as has been repeatedly noted, educators soon caught 
the true spirit of the new demand and were quick to re- 
spond. They have responded so well as to discover that 
in the last analysis there is an intellectual basis for all 
industry and an industrial basis for all education that is 
safe for everybody to use ; they have shown that the names 
of various occupations are but names for different forms 
of activity and service ; that all fundamental occupations 
are learned professions, and that any form of education 
that fits for nothing in particular is worse than useless, 
even dangerous. 

So we must look at this matter broadly. Our problem 
is but a part of a more general one ; moreover, this genera] 
problem of how to educate for all the useful activities is 



Ii8 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

the very problem upon which all educators are busily at 
work, and they are solving it inch by inch and day by day. 
It is for us to stay with the crowd and be in at the finish. 

The American high school is a form of secondary educa- 
tion that has arisen, or more properly speaking is arising, 
to meet this new demand for universal education. Agri- 
culture, and industrial education generally, have found 
their true place in the universities. The next step is that 
they should find their true place in our secondary schools, 
where, after all, our attempt at universal education will 
render its greatest service. 

10. If industrial education is to be conducted in sepa- 
rate schools, it must not be forgotten that in losing the in- 
dustrial people it is the ninety-five per cent that is cleaving 
off ; that the first effect of this loss is the reduction of the 
high school to a girls* school ; that the next effect is the 
loss of financial support, and the last stage is the degeneracy 
of the high school to a college preparatory school with no 
message of its own to the people. 

Reasons might be multiplied indefinitely, showing why 
it is wiser to go forward, meeting our educational necessi- 
ties together, but they would all be of the same general 
tenor ; viz. : that our educational problem is after all a 
single problem — complex, puzzling, and all that ; but it is 
a single problem after all, and we should stay together and 
solve it. 

If the high schools were as indifferent and as antagonis- 
tic toward industrial education to-day as the colleges were 
fifty years ago, I would raise my voice loudest for a sepa- 
rate system of agricultural and other industrial high schools. 
But they are not indifferent, they are interested ; they are 
not antagonistic, they are exceedingly friendly Agri- 
culture has found its place in our American system of 



UNITY IN EDUCATION 



119 



education, so far as colleges are concerned, and its place 
is in most honorable company. It remains to find its place 
in the high schools, and when that place is found, may it 
be equally honorable and equally favorable with the place 
it occupies in our great universities where it has done so 
well, and may industry in general enjoy the same experi- 
ence. 

In a large sense we are at the parting of the ways in 
this matter. The demand for education in agriculture has 
come to stay. Indeed, it is but a part of a larger move- 
ment for industrial education generally ; meaning by that, 
education with a view to some form of useful service in 
the fundamental industries as well as in the so-called learned 
professions. This larger demand also has not only come 
to stay, but it has the sympathy and earnest support of the 
masses of the people and the very large majority of our 
best educators. The only substantial difference of opinion 
is as to the best method of procedure, whether by a series 
of schools of as many distinct types as there are occupa- 
tions and interests, or by a single system of schools with 
separate courses. Which shall be adopted as the final 
American policy of education is a matter before us for dis- 
cussion — and there is at present no deeper educational 
problem — and as has elsewhere been remarked more de- 
pends upon what we actually do now within the next five 
years than it can depend on what we think and say and try 
to do twenty-five years from now. 

This issue is upon philosophies of education so widely 
different that the choice once made will be final, and the 
consequences well-nigh irretrievable. I am one who firmly 
believes that within the next ten years we shall decide for 
all time whether we shall reap the full fruits of our 
thoroughly unique educational opportunities in America, 



120 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

or whether we shall needlessly follow in the footsteps ot 
Europe, where social distinctions were established, and the 
peasant classes fully fixed, long before the modern age of 
universal education was thought of. 

Personally, I do not believe in that philosophy of educa- 
tion which would establish separate schools for the various 
industries and occupations of life. I greatly prefer that 
theory of social and industrial development which would 
establish and maintain a single system of schools wherein 
the people of all classes should be educated together, dis- 
tinct courses being framed and conducted for the benefit 
of each in so far as the interests differ from those of the 
common mass or of other professions. And so shall we 
be one people. To this end let us be wise and preserve 
our educational unity as we work at the solution of our 
difficult problem of universal education. 



PART II 



AGRICULTURAL 

The preceding pages have necessarily been written from 
the agricultural standpoint, because whatever knowledge 
of education I may possess has been acquired by an inti- 
mate contact with agricultural people and a long experi- 
ence with their struggle upward to the attainment of an 
adequate and suitable education. 

I have, however, for the most part avoided detail, because 
the purpose was to confine attention to the general policies 
of education in that region where the industrial and non- 
industrial meet ; where occupations shade into each other 
by imperceptible gradations and where one man's voca- 
tion becomes another's avocation. Any one, therefore, who 
might chance to scan these pages for the purpose of ob- 
taining a hint as to practical methods of procedure in 
introducing industrial courses into existing schools in order 
to secure the educational unity herein advocated, would be 
disappointed unless a little space were devoted to that end. 
I have, therefore, added Part II with the hope of being 
able to show how agriculture at least may make its way 
into existing schools without detriment to other courses, but 
vastly to their advantage. 



123 



CHAPTER VII 



AGRICULTURE IN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 

" Is agriculture a college subject or is it a high school subject ? 
Our forefathers conducted the discussion as if it were one or the 
other. In these days we may answer, — it is both." ^ 

Agriculture has earned an honorable place in some of 
the greatest universities in America, where, with respect 
both to research and instruction, it is beginning to com- 
pare favorably with other professional and scientific sub- 
jects. 

It will never, however, really reach the masses of the 
people in an adequate way until it attains in the high 
school the same relative rank it has already attained in the 
college, nor will the work of its extension be fully done 
until in some form its influence has permeated into the 

grades. 

The next step, however, is to introduce agriculture into 
the existing high schools just as it has come in beside other 
and older subjects in the state universities, and it is no 
stretch of the prophetic imagination to predict that this 
great study will vitalize the high school as it has helped to 
vitalize the universities wherever it has been introduced 
and properly supported, and from these schools it will per- 
colate by natural process into the grades. 

It has commonly been assumed that the place to begin 

^ Extract from an address of the author upon the History of Collegiate Education in Agri* 
culture, read at the meeting of the Society for the Promotion of Agricultural Science, at haas- 
ing, Michigan, June, 1907. 

124 



AGRICULTURE IN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 125 

the further extension of agricultural education is with the 
elementary country school. The writer does not share 
this opinion, but his feeling is that the strongly organized 
high school is the next place in which to undertake the 
work of agricultural education. This opinion is based 
upon the following reasons : — 

1. The students are older than those of the grades and 
are beginning to think about things vocational. 

2. The teaching power is stronger and the work can 
be better done, while that which is experimental will be 
in the hands of more experienced teachers better capable 
of making necessary readjustments or amendments as to 
methods. 

3. The Experiment Stations have provided a mass of 
material entirely suitable for secondary school purposes, 
while the literature for the elementary school yet remains 
to be made. 

4. The colleges of agriculture have tested a mass of 
material and methods and found by experience what is 
most successful from the teaching standpoint. Much of 
this can be carried over bodily into the high school with 
only such modifications, eliminations, and change of 
emphasis as a good secondary school teacher with fair 
knowledge of the subject will know well how to make. 

5. The same energy and the same teaching force will 
accomplish vastly more at this point than in the grades. 
Not only that, but activity here will in a short time produce 
in the high schools as well as in the normal schools a class 
of teachers who can transfer this work to the grades with 
prospects of success ; whereas to begin in the grades pre- 
supposes a class of teachers that does not at present exist 
and for whose training there is as yet no adequate machin- 
ery. 



126 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

Before discussing details further, let me say that when I 
speak of teaching agriculture in our high schools, I mean 
agriculture. I do not mean nature study, nor do I mean 
that some sort of pedagogical kink should be given to 
chemistry or botany or even geography and arithmetic. 
Let these arts and sciences be taught from their own stand- 
point, with as direct application to as many affairs of real 
life as possible ; but let chemistry continue to be chemistry, 
and let agriculture introduce new matter into the schools and 
with it a new point of view. Nor should this new matter 
be " elementary agriculture." In some ways I could wish 
the phrase had never been coined. What is wanted in our 
high schools is not elementary agriculture, but elemental, 
fundamental agriculture. For this purpose we should select 
out of what is taught in our colleges not only those phases 
of agriculture which are adapted to use in the high school, 
but also those that strike at the root of farm life and its 
affairs — something that will appeal to real farmers and 
that will serve actually to educate their boys for the busi- 
ness of farming — soil physics, soil fertility, laboratory 
fields in crop production, the use of farm machinery, 
and the classification and principles of feeding of live 
stock. 

As I see it, every high school that has a natural agricul- 
tural constituency of any considerable importance should 
put in a department of agriculture on the same basis as its 
department of chemistry, and proceed to offer at least one 
year, and better four years, of technical agriculture taught 
from the standpoint of the farm, that is, for the purpose of 
making farmers, to be accompanied by such collateral in- 
struction in the arts and sciences as shall provide a suitable 
course for such of its pupils as find their interests in the 
country and on the farm. 



AGRICULTURE IN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 127 

The other point on which I would be particular is this : 
I am not arguing that the high schools in their present 
condition are doing, or are able to do, what is needed for 
agriculture. My contention is that they can get ready to 
do it, and that right speedily ; and that if they will pro- 
ceed to get ready they should have the chance, for it is 
their opportunity and their privilege ; and if they do not 
propose to serve agriculture and her people as faithfully 
and as well as they are serving or intend to serve other 
interests, then they should be compelled to do it. That is 
my thesis in a few words ; but my conviction is that they 
are for the most part fully ready to direct both their schol- 
arship and their tremendous efficiency toward our problem 
if we will let them, and show them how.^ 

I can best illustrate my thought in this connection by 
an outline of four years' work in agriculture designed to 
occupy one fourth of the time of a high school student 
preparing for the farm. This course is not assumed to be 
ideal, but it is known to be teachable to students of high 
school age because most of it has been so taught, and 
while special cases will require emendations, additions, or 
substitutions, it is confidently believed that this outline 
may be accepted as a safe basis for the present tentative 
efforts. Indeed, I am convinced that it will require less 
radical change than has been found necessary in college 
courses everywhere. 

The following outline is intended to provide one of the 
four subjects which the high school student is supposed 
to take ; that is to constitute one fourth of the work of such 
high school students as expect to live upon the farm : — 

* Extract from an address on The Next Step in Agricdltural Education, read at the Uni- 
versity of Missouri, January 9, 1909. 



128 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

Outline of Four Years' Work in High School Agriculture 

Without further discussion the outline is presented in full by years 
following as closely as possible the seasonal conditions.^ It will be 
noted that the outline provides one year's work in each of the following 
general lines : 

1. Crops and Crop Production 

2. Soils and Soil Treatment 

3. Animals. Feeding and Breeding 

4. Farm Engineering 

FIRST YEAR 

Crops AND Crop Production ^ 

Fall 

Harvesting. Methods of harvesting grasses, grains, fruits, and vege- 
tables, and cost per acre or per market unit by different methods ; cur- 
ing and storing, especially for winter ; selecting, curing and storing 
seeds for next year's use. 

Yields and Prices. Making a table of the yield of each crop that 
ought to be expected by a good farmer in the neighborhood ; getting 
actual neighborhood yields for the year ; making a table of prices of 
farm products for the last ten years. 

Grains. Description of six varieties of wheat and oats ; grading of 
wheat and oats by market standard ; the proper seed bed for wheat ; 
testing varieties of wheat in experimental plots ; ^ experiments on the 
effect of size of grain upon yield in same variety ; description of six 
varieties of corn ; corn judging by score card ; preparation and storage 
of seed corn ; shrinkage of corn and wheat in storage ; botanical rela- 
tions of the grain crops ; the chinch bug and the hessian fly, identifica- 
tion, life history, and means of preventing damage by. 

Legumes. Identification and description of any three of the follow- 
ing: Alfalfa, red clover, white clover, alsike, cow peas, soy beans, 

lit is of course impossible to be both logical and chronological at the same time, and the 
teacher will need sometimes to look ahead in order to anticipate and provide for coming 
needs. 

2 The particular crops studied most carefully would necessarily vary with the locality. 

8 All work except plowing and harrowing to be done by students. 



AGRICULTURE IN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 



129 



field peas, vetch ; effect of the legumes on soil fertility and their special 
value for feeding ; botanical relations of the leguminous crops. 

Grasses. Identification and description of any three of the following : 
Timothy, blue grass, orchard grass, redtop, millet, broom corn, sorg- 
hum, wheat, oats, rye, barley ; uses of the grasses for grain, hay and 
pasture ; botanical relations of the grasses. 

Weeds. Identification of the twenty-five most common weeds ; mak- 
ing a collection of weed seeds in small bottles, properly labeled, same 
to be the property of the student ; burying seeds of different kinds in 
bottles filled with soil, and buried mouth down, to be dug up year by 
year for vitality test ; description of stem, seed, leaf and root ; habits of 
growth of the most common weeds ; best methods of eradication of 
different weeds, as dependent upon habits of growth. 

Fruits. Budding the peach; study of the ravages of fungus and 
insect enemies of the apple. 

Literature. The Cereals of America — Hunt ; The Book of Corn — 
Myrick ; Grasses and Clovers, Field Roots, Forage and Fodder 
Plants — Shaw. 

Winter 

Grading. Judging and grading of grains and fruits ; examining 
grass, clover, alfalfa, and other small seeds for purity and identification 
of weed seeds. 

Testing. Germination tests, preferably of corn and other seeds to be 
used in the neigborhood. 

Conditions of Germination. Heat, moisture. 

Co7iditions of Growth. Heat, moisture, light, plant food ; what comes 
from the air and what from the soil ; indispensable elements ; what 
plants manufacture — starch, sugar, cellulose, proteid substances, oils, 
with characteristics of each. 

Garden Plans. Definite planting plans for the home garden. 

Spring 

Preparation. The construction of the hotbed and cold frame; 
planting and care of the same. 

Pruning. Principles of pruning; pruning common fruit and or- 
namental trees. ^ 

1 The best time to prune both trees and vines is after the severe cold of the winter and 
before growth starts in the spring. 



I30 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

Grafting. Top and root grafting of the apple. 

Crop Enemies. Sprouting of spores of oat smut or wheat rust; 
treating of oats for smut; potato scab as a fungus disease; treat- 
ing of potatoes for scab ; study of the corn -root aphis. 

Planting. Thick and thin seeding of oats ; thick and thin plant- 
ing of corn; tip kernels and butt kernels in comparison with those 
from the middle of the ear; large potatoes in comparison with small 
potatoes for seed ; whole potatoes in comparison with pieces for seed ; 
examination and comparison of drained and undrained lands as to 
fitness for planting. 

Spraying. The most common fungus and insect enemies of tree 
and fruit; spraying materials; making spraying mixtures; spraying 
for codling moth. 

Tree Planting. Preparation of trees for planting; the right and 
wrong way to set a tree ; care of the transplanted tree. 

The Garden. Planting of school and home gardens. 

Cultivation. The purposes of cultivation, to maintain conditions of 
growth and to kill weeds ; the best methods of cultivating the spring 
crops, with experiments on the deep and shallow cultivation of corn ; 
reports upon the methods of cultivation in vogue in the neighborhood ; 
making tests for moisture in field soils differently cultivated, choosing 
an exceptionally dry time for the examination ; probably of necessity 
deferred until summer. 

Growth. Study of the root system of a single plant of corn or 
other field crop, especially of potatoes grown in pots or in glass-sided 
boxes ; rate of growth of corn in height ; planting corn, beans, potatoes, 
and sweet peas at different depths ; harvesting of early crops and 
arranging for succeeding harvests during the summer vacation ; study 
of habits and life history of at least two of the most injurious insects 
of the region. 

Fertilization. How flowers fertilize. Study especially the apple, 
pear, and peach ; later the strawberry ; and still later wheat and corn. 

Economic Botany. Making a list of field, orchard, and garden plants 
and trees that are useful to man ; identifying twenty trees and shrubs 
suitable for ornamental planting, and pressing leaves and blossoms 
from each ; harvesting of crops during the summer or in the fall. 

Literature. The Pruning Book — Bailey; The Principles of Fruit 
Growing — Bailey; The Nursery Book — Bailey; Garden Making — 
Bailey; Farmers' Bulletins, Nos. 35, 91, 129, 132, 199, 214, 215, 229 
and 249, U. S. Dept. of Agr., Washington, D. C. ; University of 



AGRICULTURE IN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 131 

Illinois Experiment Station Bulletins, Nos. 37, 100, 117, 119, 121, 
126, 127 and 128; Circulars 81, 89 and 117; Cyclopedia of American 
Agriculture, Vol. i, pp. 320-521. 



SECOND YEAR 

Soils and Soil Management 

Let the school secure a piece of land and lay out a series of plots for 
demonstrating under field conditions the fundamental principles of soil 
fertility. Let the plots be of any convenient size up to a tenth of an 
acre. Plant to a single staple crop year after year, or better to a rota- 
tion of such crops ; keep notes of the relative appearance and records 
of the several yields, using sufficient lime to correct acidity as the 
demonstration progresses. Apply the following soil treatments be- 
fore planting: 

No. I. No treatment. 

No. 2. Nitrogen treatment in the form of dried blood at the rate of 

700 pounds per acre. 
No. 3. Nitrogen treatment by the use of leguminous crops. 
No. 4. Potassium alone by the use of potassium sulphate at the rate 

of 200 pounds per acre. 
No. 5. No treatment. 
No. 6. Phosphorus alone by the use of steamed bone meal at the 

rate of 200 pounds per acre. 
No. 7. Phosphorus and nitrogen combined. 
No. 8. Potassium and nitrogen combined. 
No. 9. Phosphorus and potassium combined. 
No. 10. Phosphorus, potassium and nitrogen combined. 
No. II. Farmyard manure alone at the rate of 4,000 pounds per acre 

per year, or 8,000 pounds every four years (unleached). 
No. 12. Farmyard manure supplemented by phosphorus, using 600 

pounds of ground phosphate rock per 4,000 pounds of 

manure. 

No. 13. No treatment. 



132 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

Fall 

Harvesting crops from experiment plots, and comparison of yields 
with former years. 

The need of nitrogen and its supply by leguminous crops. 

Root tubercles and inoculation. 

The need of phosphorus and the sources of its supply ; rock phos- 
phate and bone meal. 

The need of potassium and the commercial supply. 

The acid test of soils. The need of lime and its commercial supply. 

Farmyard manure ; its value, its preservation and its application. 

Rotation of crops from the fertility standpoint. 

Critical study of the yields and the farm practices of the neighborhood, 
designating individual farms as A, B, etc., but concealing the names. 

Farm Accounting. Developing a system of farm accounting that 
shall note both the cost of production and the draft upon fertility with 
the cost of its restoration. The text and cards as used at Minnesota 
School of Agriculture, St. Anthony Park, are recommended. Develop- 
ing a system for a special farm. 

Literature. Secondary School Agriculture — Barto; Soil Fertility 
and Permanent Agriculture — Hopkins; How Crops Feed — Johnson; 
Fertilizers — Vorhees ; The Fertility of the Land — Roberts ; Soils — 
E. W. Hilgard; Illinois Bulletin No. 76, Alfalfa on Illinois Soil; The 
Soil — A. D. Hall. 

Winter 

Origin of Soils. Sources of soils and their formation from rocks by 
the agency of water, wind, frost, vegetation and insect activity. 

Classification. Different kinds of soils, as clay, sand, loam, surface 
and subsoil. 

Soil Physics. The formation and classification of soils ; making a col- 
lection of not less than six different kinds of soils ; capillary and hy- 
groscopic water ; laboratory experiments to determine the water power 
of different kinds of soils ; laboratory experiments upon the capillary 
movements of water in different kinds of soils ; effect of water on the 
color and the temperature of soils ; effect of drainage ; size of tile for 
different areas ; laboratory experiments in methods of conserving soil 
moisture ; physical effects of lime on soils ; effects of freezing ; effects 
of puddling; the seed bed and its preparation for different crops; 



AGRICULTURE IN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 133 

methods of tillage to secure the condition of germination and growth 
in different soils. 

Literature. Secondary School Agriculture — Barto ; Physics of 
Agriculture — King ; The Soil — King. 

Spring 

The Seed Bed. Its preparation for different kinds of crops and at 
different seasons of the year. 

Tillage. Methods of, to secure and maintain the proper conditions 
of growth ; the dust mulch for dry weather ; critical study of neighbor- 
hood practices ; plowing clay land in midsummer and harrowing to re- 
tain moisture ; effect of humus in the soil ; turning under green crops 
to keep up the supply. 

Rotation. To be studied from the standpoint of crop requirements 
and distribution of labor; hired labor on the farm. 

Effect of Drainage. Comparative study of drained and undrained 
soils in the neighborhood as to earliness of working and the condition 
of soil in late spring and summer. 

Literature. Farm Drainage — Elliot ; Irrigation and Drainage — 
King. 

THIRD YEAR 

Animals and Animal Affairs 

Fall^ 

Horses. Draft and driving horses contrasted; the anatomy of the 
horse studied from chart or skeleton ; practice in judging, especially as 
to market types ; identification of the common breeds ; care of the 
horse's foot ; care of the neck and shoulder ; proper grooming ; care as 
to feed and water when warm ; treatment for colic. 

Cattle. Beef and dairy cattle contrasted ; practice in judging, es- 
pecially as to market grades ; identification of the common breeds ; 
practice in judging upon such material as can be secured in the neigh- 
borhood ; how to treat bloat, garget, cake and milk fever ; how to treat 
tuberculosis on the farm. 

Swine. Practice in judging, especially as to market types ; identifi- 
cation of the breeds of swine. 

* Types and Breeds of Farm Animals by Plumb is suggested as a text. 



134 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

Sheep. The coarse and fine wooled breeds contrasted both for 
mutton and for wool ; practice in judging. 

Chickens. The common breeds of chickens, their identification and 
points of excellence. 

General. Animal census of the school district as to number, char- 
acter and value of farm animals. 

Literature. Types and Breeds of Farm Animals — Plumb ; Breeders' 
Gazette, Chicago, 111. ; Hoard's Dairyman, Fr. Atkinson, Wis. ; Bul- 
letins Agr. Exp. Station, University of Illinois, Nos. 78, 97, 122, 129. 

Winter 

Poultry. Construction of the poultry house ; care of hens for winter 
laying; the use of the incubator and the production of the spring 
chicken. 

Feeds and Feeding. Composition of standard feeding stuffs ; the 
nutritive ratio for cattle, horses, sheep, and swine, with practice in com- 
pounding rations ; comparison of the feeding practices of the neighbor- 
hood with standard rations ; silage and its uses ; filling the silo, the 
method and cost ; special value of leguminous hay ; the balanced ration, 
protein, carbohydrates and minerals ; how to harden the horse for 
spring work. 

Cows. Composition of milk and the use of the Babcock test ; com- 
parison between cows of the neighborhood for efficiency, as determined 
by the scales and the test ; the nutritive ratio for milk production com- 
pared with the feeding practices of the neighborhood ; keeping quality of 
milk produced by different methods of sanitary preparation, clean udders, 
filthy udders, fore milk, middle milk, last milk, open pail, covered pail, 
open dish, bottle. 

Meats. The production of beef contrasted with the production of 
milk, with studies upon local practices if possible ; different cuts of 
meat, their cost and comparative value for food. 

Literature. Milk and Its Uses — Wing; Feeds and Feeding — 
Henry ; Diseases of Farm Animals — Laws. 

Spring 

Origin of domesticated races. 

Natural Selection. 

Improvement by selection ; essentials in reproduction. 

Heredity and its corollary, variation. 



AGRICULTURE IN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 135 

Practice in breeding, much of which will of necessity extend into the 
summer and also the following year. 

How to cross ; cross pop corn, sweet corn, field corn both naturally and 
artificially ; inbreed field corn, sweet corn and pop corn ; plant the mixed 
kernels and note the character of crop. Detassel and compare the yield 
of the detasseled with the entire row ; select for length of ear ; select 
for greatest yield ; select for height of ear on stalk ; select for widest 
leaf; select for number of rows; select for any striking feature, as for 
corn on the tassel. Plant corn found growing upon the tassel ; establish 
separate strains of clover and timothy ; hunt for divided head of timothy, 
plant it. Make a collection of freaks in plant growth. If possible, 
establish a poultry plant in connection with the school and select for 
maximum in egg production and for plumage coloration. 

Planting or other experiments made this year to be carried over into 
the next sufficiently to permit a study of results. 

Literature. Origin of Species — Darwin. Domesticated Animals and 
Plants — Davenport. 



FOURTH YEAR 
Farm Mechanics 

Fall 

Student's progress in special subject. 

Cement Construction. Making of cement trial blocks with different 
proportions of sand ; laboratory experiments ; making of fence posts ; 
reenforcement ; construction of walks, tanks, and small bridges ; silo 
construction. 

Drainage. Location of tile and sewer drains ; leveling for drains ; 
digging the ditch ; leveling and finishing the bottom ; laying tile and 
sewer pipe; the general nature of infectious diseases, with especial 
reference to those carried by water ; source and supply of pure water ; 
sanitary drainage ; house sanitation. 

Literature. Farm Drainage — Elliot ; Irrigation and Drainage — 
King ; Sanitation of the Country House — Bashore ; Water and Public 
Health — Fuertes ; The Chemistry of Life and Health — Kimmius ; 
Bacteria in Relation to Country Life, Parts II and III — Lipman ; 
Proper Disposal of Sewage Wastes in Rural Districts (Nelson, Bull. 
166, New Jersey Agr. Exp. Sta.) ; Sewage Disposal on the Farm and 



136 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

Protection of Drinking Water (T.Smith, Farmers' Bull. 43); Cyclo- 
pedia of Am. Agr., Vol. I, pp. 231-307. 1 

Winter 

Student's progress in the special subject. 

Comparative studies jn designs for farm buildings, especially houses 
and barns. 

Equipment of houses and barns with heat, light, motor power, water 
pressure, ventilating and cleaning devices and other machinery. 

Design of farmstead grounds and their suitable planting. 

Each student should prepare and present an original design of either 
building, equipment, or planting. 

Literature. Country Life in America; Farm Dwellings — "Wing; 
The Farmstead — Roberts. 

Spring 

Student's progress in the special subject. 

Application of the fertilizers and planting of spring crops on the 
permanent plots. 

Construction and Operation of Farm Machinery. A careful study of 
what the tool is designed to do and the special manner of doing it, to 
be accomplished by taking down and setting up not less than two ma- 
chines, the mower and the self-binder ; adjustment of the plow ; use of 
the small gasoline engine. 

Care of Machinery. Cleaning and oiling ; the protection of wearing 
parts, especially where wood and iron come together ; necessity of hous- 
ing ; overhauling and preparation for winter storage ; securing and 
keeping a good cutting edge. 

Bench and Forge Work. Sufficient to enable the student to make 
simple repairs in wood and iron. 

Report on the special subject. 

Literature. Farm Machinery and Farm Motors — Davidson & 
Chase ; ^ Concrete Construction about the Home and on the Farm — the 
Atlas Portland Cement Company, New York City ; ^ Science of Suc- 
cessful Threshing — J. I. Case & Company, Racine, Wis.; Kent's 
Mechanical Engineers' Pocketbook. 

For information on Belt Lacing, etc., get catalogues from any com- 
pany manufacturing them. 

1 Pamphlets issued by manufacturers for advertising purposes. 



AGRICULTURE IN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 137 

Is it objected that such a course of academic procedure 
is certain to exclude other studies that are indispensable ? 
To such objection I answer as follows : — 

1. No instruction is more indispensable than that which 
enables the individual to be self-sustaining and to contribute 
his share to the world's work that must be done if man as 
a whole is to progress or even to exist. 

2. There is no law but custom to dictate that a high 
school course is to be exactly four years long, and if such 
a procedure as is herein advocated should lengthen the 
school period to five years, it would be to the advantage 
both of secondary and of higher education. 

3. Something can be done both by condensation and 
elimination as well as by better methods of study and of 
teaching to reduce the time limit without impoverishing the 
course. 

4. If the student is getting something day by day which, 
to his senses, is evidently going to help him to succeed as 
he sees success, then he will not only remain longer in the 
school, but he will pursue his other studies with greater 
willingness and better results, all of which tends to higher 
scholarship within the school as well as to greater efficiency 
afterward. 

5. At best but a small fraction graduate from any 
course, hence this plan will provide the student day by day 
with a balanced programme as between the vocational and 
the non-vocational, and the preservation of this balance is 
of vastly more consequence than is the total length of the 
course or the mere element of graduation. 



CHAPTER VIII 

AGRICULTURE IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL 

" As the twig is bent the tree is inclined." 

Something of agriculture can certainly be taught in the 
grades, and especially in such of the ungraded country 
schools as have not yet felt the blighting effect of better 
schools in the near vicinity. Just what this will be is yet 
to be worked out. It must be borne in mind that about 
all the real experience we have had in teaching agriculture 
is in colleges and for the specific purpose of training 
farmers. Manifestly this experience can be transferred 
almost bodily to the high school, which also fits for life, so 
that the problem of introducing agriculture in these schools 
is largely one of selection of material and its proper corre- 
lation with the non-technical. 

The introduction of agriculture into the grades, however, 
is another matter. It is not simpler, but vastly more diffi- 
cult, partly because the technical significance of the sub- 
ject is less and its pedagogical significance is more, and 
partly because the teacher is and must be less of a 
specialist. 

No thinking man, however, can avoid the conviction that 
technical instruction should begin in the grades and the 
child not to be permitted to reach the high school age with- 
out its attention having been sharply directed to the way in 
which the family Hfe is sustained. This is partly because 
habits of industry and thrift are necessary and need to be 

138 



AGRICULTURE IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL 139 

instilled early to be effective, and partly because the great 
mass of children never continue beyond the grades. 

The unpardonable sin of the parent or the teacher is 
to urge the child to " get an education so he won't have 
to work." Unfortunately neither parents nor teachers can 
claim immunity at this point, and when this economic, 
social, and moral offense is committed, it is directed alike 
against the little one and the generation of which he is so 
soon to form an integral part. He is to get an education 
that his work may be more effective and his life as a whole 
more successful ; and as life in general is founded upon 
industry, so should the industrial side of his education begin 
early and proceed as a parallel to the end, or, at least, until 
intelligently abandoned for a non-industrial profession. It 
may be remarked parenthetically that the public is not 
interested in those forms of education that end in nothing 
and that express themselves in no form of human activity, 
using the term activity in its broadest sense. 

Our first attempts at universal education resulted, not 
advantageously, but disastrously, to many of our most use- 
ful and necessary occupations. Children of farmers and 
mechanics flocked to school, but the course of study was 
adapted to the so-called learned professions. It was not 
only silent about the great industries of life, but the in- 
fluence exerted upon the young was to fire them with an 
ambition to " rise in the world," whatever that may be. 
The meaning given the term, however, by repeated if not 
almost daily injunction of teacher and text alike was to "get 
an education that you may not be obliged to labor." 

This was universal education only in the sense that 
everybody was admitted to the schools : it was not univer- 
sal education in the sense that a true picture was afforded 
of the many activities of a highly civilized state. It was 



140 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

not universal in the sense that the necessary occupation of 
some ninety per cent of all the people was ^f airly treated. 
The courses of study not only failed to provide anything 
directly professional in farming, mechanics, and the useful 
arts and industries generally, but the incidental influence 
was to crowd the hundred per cent into the occupations of 
the ten per cent. 

So the mechanic's boy that went much to school seldom 
or never returned to the shop, and out of the many who 
went out to seek their fortune, a few, of course, succeeded 
and served as examples to fire other hundreds to " escape 
from a life of toil." 

In the same way the farm boy who had much contact 
with the schools seldom returned to the farm, but hied 
him to the city, where he was welcome for his habits of 
thrifty industry, whether he ever rose or whether he ground 
his life out in a cheap clerkship. This stripping of the 
land and the country of its brightest and best, its most 
ambitious and promising young went on until a general 
state of public alarm ensued as to the consequences of 
such a system of one-sided education when applied to all 
the people, for the evident effect was to strip the useful 
industries and occupations of the choicest young men and 
pile them up in a few favored callings where many of them 
were not needed nor wanted. 

This was not the worst result, either, because this effect 
of education upon the industries themselves was not help- 
ful but disastrous, whereas we have a right to assume that 
if all men are to be educated, then all occupations will be 
elevated and developed and improved as only educated and 
able men can improve a profession. Hence the revolution 
against the first effects of universal education ; hence the 
crusade for agricultural education ; hence the demand for 



AGRICULTURE IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL 141 

industrial courses, hoping that the young may thereby be 
really fitted to live the lives that most normal men must live, 
and that useful occupations may be profited and not dam- 
aged by the operations of a system of universal education. 

Accordingly we must begin industrial education as early 
as possible, and agriculture is no exception. I do not 
claim that it is easy : I only say that it must be done. I 
do not claim that it is as easy as to teach the same subjects 
and the same ideals to older pupils in the high schools and 
colleges : I only say that the way must be found, the matter 
selected, and the method worked out. I propose no definite 
details at this point, but await the results of the many 
trials that are now being made in this new and most diffi- 
cult field of education, confidently believing that in the 
very near future we shall have as definite knowledge as to 
matter and methods here as we now possess in the realm 
of the college and the high school. Like all new move- 
ments this will proceed from above downward, and as ex- 
perience in the teaching of agriculture in the colleges has 
paved the way for the high school, so will its teaching there 
and in the normal schools assist progress in the grades. 

Fortunately for this particular subject it is closely related 
to that recently recognized pedagogical necessity, nature 
study, only it is nature study of a peculiarly valuable sort. 

"Agriculture, even in the grades, is something more 
than ordinary nature study. It is nature study plus utility. 
It is nature study with an economic significance. It is 
nature study which articulates with the affairs of real men 
in real life. It is nature study in which the child may in- 
fluence the processes. It is nature study which distinctly 
stimulates industry." ^ 

1 Quoted from a paper by the author on the Relation of Nature Study and Agriculture in 
Elementary Rural Schools, Meeting of the American Nature Study Society, Baltimore, De- 
cember 29, 1908. 



142 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

When the pupil is sent to study the tree, the bird, or the 
insect, the most that he can do is to observe and record. 
This is all good in its way, but the tree, the bird, and the 
insect are self-sufficient unto themselves, or, at least, are 
in no sense dependent upon the boy, nor are they of much 
consequence to him or his except in anaesthetic sense. 

When, however, the boy is set to studying the pig, the 
matter of utility at once enters in as a factor of the problem. 
The pig is worth something and the boy can see it. He 
can see how the bare existence of the pig is dependent 
upon regular feeding which he himself may give ; and 
how the pig, when he is brought to a finish, is capable of 
contributing not only to the support of the body, but can be 
sold for money with which the boy may possess himself of 
anything dear to his heart. He sees, in other words, how 
he himself may influence the production of pigs, and if 
he has even a fair share of that creative activity which most 
boys possess, it will be stimulated into action by the pros- 
pect. 

If he is set to studying the cow and her milk, especially 
if he learns how to compare one kind of milk with another, 
or if his attention is even directed to the conditions under 
which different kinds may be produced, he sees in concrete 
ways how Nature behaves in her workshop, what it is that 
Nature is doing, day by day, and how it is that these activ- 
ities are connected with the affairs of men. He cannot 
help seeing how the family that owns good cows has an 
advantage in the world over those whose cows are poor or 
ill-fed. 

If he is set to studying corn, he knows at once that he is 
dealing with a crop whose management is in the nands of 
man ; with something that does not exist for itself alone 
and that would not and could not exist except for man's at* 



AGRICULTURE IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL 143 

tention. All this helps to stimulate activity and produc- 
tive energy on the part of the child, which is one of the 
things we need to nourish when we take children out of 
real life for a considerable length of time and put them 
into that artificial world we call the schoolroom. 

So we might review the whole gamut of topics agricul- 
tural and show how their study stimulates and satisfies 
something more than curiosity or even observation and 
record ; how they reach out and take hold of the very life 
of the boy, and how they connect the affairs of the school 
and the schoolroom with those of the home, the neighbor- 
hood, and the world into which the child is already anxious 
to plunge and make himself known and felt. 

One of our problems in education is how to give inform- 
ation to the young and how to teach methods of acquiring 
more without destroying creative instinct; how to com- 
pensate in the school for some of the damage we have 
done in taking the child out of real life during the educa- 
tive process. Now nature study in itself is good for this 
purpose. It is more than that ; it is excellent. It stimu- 
lates a love for the material that is around us. It stimu- 
lates observation of what is going on, and it gives practice 
in making accurate records of what is seen ; but if nature 
study can extend into the realm of the useful, into the 
region of the productive, into the world where human 
relations are involved, then so much the better. 

This is the possibility of agriculture as a subject for 
study in the grades. The large question is the teacher. 
To what extent can the grade teacher know the field well 
enough to use it to advantage for these purposes ? The 
only answer is that all too often the teacher is unable to 
make proper use of this mass of the best material in the 
world for teaching processes and that lies close at hand. 



144 



EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 



It is the old story over again of looking afar off for the 
things that after all are close by ; but in this, as in many 
other things, even though the ideal cannot be attained, an 
honest attempt is well worth while, and if the teachers can 
be induced to combine, along with observation and record, 
the elements of usefulness and the human relation, then it 
will be well worth all it costs to stimulate as much as pos- 
sible the teaching of agriculture in the grades of the public 
schools. 

Moreover, as this subject makes its way into the high 
schools and the normal schools the time will not be long 
before teachers will be developed with the training and the 
material to go out into the world of the children and hold 
up to them a fairly true picture of the world in its industrial 
activities. 

As I see it, the objects of teaching in the grades and 
especially in the country school that superior quality of 
nature study which we may call agriculture may be briefly 
outlined as follows : — 

1. To educate partly by means of that industry lying 
nearest at hand, to the end that the student may be active 
rather than passive — a doer as well as a thinker. 

2. To widen the perspective and so far as possible to 
introduce the student to the real life of the world. 

3. To instill a respect for industry in general. 

4. To give some agriculture for its own sake as well as 
for its educational value in order that its fundamental need 
shall be appreciated and its practices improved. 

Not all of agriculture is available for this work, hence 
only those portions that lend themselves to the purposes of 
the school should be used to this end. Just what these 
portions shall be and precisely how they shall be handled 
remains to be determined, but the solution of the problem 



AGRICULTURE IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL 145 

is nearing and its general character is commencing to 
appear in outline. 

Whatever may be done, however, in the way of teaching 
agriculture in the grades, the ultimate solution of the 
country school problem lies not in the old-fashioned, un- 
graded district school, but in the modern method of con- 
solidation whereby a half-dozen or more weak single-room 
and single-teacher schools are combined into one school 
with several teachers — an effective organization for doing 
well-defined high school as well as grade work. I am 
not unaware of the substantial advantages of the old-time 
country school or its present utility where it still lingers 
with its old-time vigor ; but it is an institution of the past ; 
an outgrowth of conditions that are passing never to return : 
moreover, its decay is hastened rather than retarded by the 
rapid movements of life in the near neighborhood, and the 
solution of the country school problem involves the exten- 
sion of the modern high school until it includes the country 
as well as the city and the town. 

In no other way can the country child as such be in- 
sured as good educational opportunities as his city cousin, 
but with a school sufficiently large to be strong and with 
good courses of agriculture in the rural and village high 
schools, the people of the country will enjoy educational 
privileges second to those of no other class, for in many 
respects they enjoy a natural and initial advantage in more 
and better sleep, in better air and more of it, and in a life 
that is richer in experience day by day. 



CHAPTER IX 

AGRICULTURE IN THE NORMAL SCHOOLS 

The sudden call for teachers of agriculture outside of 
agricultural colleges is by no means limited to high schools 
and the elementary country schools. The call is sharp 
from the normal schools of the Middle West which have 
this year taken some of the best trained and most promis- 
ing of teachers of this class. 

This problem in the normal schools is still different 
from that in any other field of agricultural education. It 
resembles that of the high school and college in that the 
school is large and strong, the pupils fairly mature, and the 
teachers skilled. It differs in the fact that the students 
are not prospective farmers, so that the technical character 
of the work is at least one remove farther from its final 
object. Not only is all this true, but the students of the 
normal school, when they in turn become teachers, will 
mostly be called upon to adapt the subject to the grades. 

On the side of both matter and method, therefore, the 
problem in the normal school possesses all the difficulties 
of the problem in the grades, with the added handicap that 
it is always more difficult to teach teachers than to teach 
students. 

Nevertheless, because it is early in the field and because 
of its interest, there is every prospect that the normal 
school will be one of the early agencies in the solution of 
the problem of secondary education in agriculture, as it will 

146 



AGRICULTURE IN THE NORMAL SCHOOLS 147 

doubtless be the principal agency in the solution of the 
difficult problem of teaching this subject in the grades. 

The incidental effect of this effort upon the spirit and 
purpose of the normal school as a whole is certain to be 
decidedly advantageous. Agriculture is a form of real 
life that is readily seen and its public significance is easily 
appreciated. Again, nowhere else will the school garden 
be Hkely to reach so perfect a stage of development as in 
the normal school, where the maturity of the student will 
insure exceptional results. 

Here, however, as in the work of the grades, much 
original work remains to be done. While the means are not 
yet clearly defined and while matter and method are still 
under experimentation, the end is clear — to train teachers 
in the art of inducting the child by easy and natural stages 
from his own little realm into the world of the present and 
the past, and to do it all without losing touch with his own 
personal environment at any point to the end that the 
educational process shall terminate in service and not in 
shiftlessness. 

It is more than likely that the introduction of agriculture 
into the normal schools will in the end exert a profound 
influence upon the teaching of general science. There is 
no manner of doubt that the masses of people are best 
benefited by the teaching of science in its applied form. 
The normal schools, however, like the high schools are 
dependent upon college graduates for teachers of science. 
In the colleges the sciences are largely taught in the 
abstract, each science from its own standpoint and with 
a view not so much of its application to the everyday 
affairs of man as to the further extention of knowledge in 
its own realm. The teacher of course, especially when young 
and inexperienced, instinctively repeats what was taught 



148 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

to him, and thus is transferred to the secondary school 
both the matter and the point of view of the college class- 
room, whereas the subject should doubtless undergo much 
transformation before being presented to the younger 
pupils of the secondary school. 

Without a doubt as the sciences come to be better de- 
veloped by the more complete exploration of their limits 
and as their mutual interrelations become better established, 
the time will come when the application of these sciences 
to human affairs will be more generally prominent in the 
mind of the experimenter and the teacher alike. With 
this will come an accumulation of a teachable body of this 
class of knowledge, and under these conditions applied 
science will come to occupy much of the time and attention 
now devoted to the abstract — all of which will be vastly 
to the profit of the people and, in the end, to the practical 
extension of science. 

Agriculture is evidently to be a pioneer in this business 
of the adaptation of science to the common affairs of life 
in the schools that are attended by the masses, and if this 
be true, its incidental service may be even larger than its 
direct In the meantime it is vastly significant that the 
schools where teachers are made have at last commenced 
seriously to study real life in one of its most concrete forms. 



CHAPTER X 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE — 
WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT MEANS i 

The energy of the soil is the life of the people. 

Agriculture is a remarkable occupation for a number 
of significant reasons : — 

1. It engages the time and attention of nearly half our 
people and it will always absorb the lives and energies of 
a very large proportion of the race. 

2. This is the only considerable calling in which the 
home is situated in close connection and in intimate contact 
with the heart of the business so that all members of the 
family, men, women, and children alike, live in the atmos- 
phere of the occupation and each finds some useful part to 
perform as a contribution to the general effort; that is, 
agriculture is not only an occupation but a mode of life as 
well, and whatever touches and uplifts the one is bound to 
react powerfully upon the other. 

3. The conditions of country life are peculiar in their 
contribution to health, their stimulus to personal initiative, 
and their fostering influence upon that spirit of individual- 
ism upon which rest our free institutions and our demo- 
cratic government. The country is a good place in which 
to be born. 

* This chapter is added to call attention to the significance and the possibilities of Ameri- 
can agriculture. It follows clearly the line of thought of an address delivered by the writer 
at the University of Maine upon the occasion of the dedication of Agricultural Hall, 
February 24, 1909. 

149 



150 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

4. The business of farming, dealing as it does at every 
step with the subtlest laws of nature, is capable of infinite 
improvement and of indefinite development as soon and as 
rapidly as the findings of science are applied to its affairs. 

5. The occupation is, and from the nature of the case 
must always remain permanent, because all men forever 
must subscribe to the decree of nature and eat, for food is 
the fuel that feeds the human engine, and in the last analy- 
sis our future development as a race will be conditioned 
upon our success in providing an assured and independent 
food supply, abundant and suitable for a highly developed 
and always advancing civilization. 

6. There is, therefore, a public as well as a private 
side to agricultural development ; and it is because of 
this public and exceptional interest in this particular oc- 
cupation that we have established and maintained at public 
expense in every state of the Union institutions whose busi- 
ness it is not only to instruct in the most advanced methods 
of agricultural practice, but also to conduct research through 
experiments by the most approved methods with a view of 
adding to our knowledge of the scientific facts and princi- 
ples upon which further development of agriculture and of 
country life may be established. 

It is exceedingly important that the aims and purposes 
of this modern educational movement be clearly understood 
and especially that they be not misunderstood. 

First of all the purpose of agricultural education and re- 
search is not to benefit the farmer as an individual or even 
farmers as a favored class. The principal aim of other 
forms of education in the past was to benefit their devotees 
personally without much regard to the consequences, either 
public or private. Not so with this form of education. Its 
primary purpose is the development of agriculture from the 



DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 151 

public standpoint as a productive occupation and inciden- 
tally and necessarily of the people who live by farming. 
In other words, its first objective is the distinctly public 
one of producing food, and all other considerations are 
secondary and subsidiary. 

Now the public is not interested in the question whether 
John Smith succeeds or fails at farming : indeed, it does not 
care whether he farms at all or what he does or does not do 
so long as he does not become a public charge and so long 
as he continues to contribute some share to the public 
good. 

But the public is interested that somebody should suc- 
ceed in farming. More than that, it is interested that 
enough people should succeed and that they should suc- 
ceed well enough to operate the land to the best advantage 
and provide an assured and sufficient food supply. Now 
the lands cannot be operated to the best advantage by an 
ignorant peasantry. Only men of good parts and educated 
in the principles involved can handle these lands in such a 
way as to secure a maximum of human and animal food at 
the least expense and at the same time preserve their pro- 
ducing power against future needs. 

The aims and purposes of agricultural education and 
research are, therefore, primarily the promotion of public 
safety in the matter of a racial food supply, to which matter 
the education and information of individuals is an essential 
but subsidiary incident ; which incident, however, is certain 
to result in producing a country population of a superior 
type, all of which also reacts powerfully upon the public 
good in matters both social and political. 

In the last analysis and reduced to the lowest terms, 
the fundamental purpose of agricultural education and re- 
search is the development of agriculture as a productive 



152 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

occupation and of the agricultural people as a numerous 
and important part of the social and political fabric. 

Development is, therefore, the central thought in educa- 
tional activity along agricultural lines to-day and the devel- 
opment of American agriculture to its highest attainable 
estate both as a business and as a mode of life is the high 
purpose for which the agricultural colleges and experiment 
stations were founded and are supported by a far-seeing and 
liberal-minded public. It is profitable and in every way 
highly important that we all pause a moment from time to 
time to gain the clearest and most comprehensive understand- 
ing possible of all that is involved in so important a matter. 
Accordingly, that we may all alike be intelligent and work 
together to a common end, I invite your attention somewhat 
carefully to the details of this development which may be 
briefly outlined under six fairly definite propositions as 
follows : — 

I. A71 Agriculture Profitable. The first step in the de- 
velopment of any business is to ** make it pay." Whatever 
we may say about the glories of country life, and it is much ; 
whatever the songs we sing of the free air, the twittering 
birds and the blessed sunshine, and they are many ; after 
all and before all, farming is a business, and the first and 
the fundamental step in its development is to put it on a 
paying basis. Our colleges and our experiment stations 
have done well, therefore, to devote their first, and up to 
this time their principal efforts to the labor of increasing 
the profits of farming. In the past, farming was not a 
capitalized industry and such a thing as failure was almost 
impossible. From now on, however, farming is to be a 
capitalized occupation and failure will be relatively easy ; 
for the new discoveries of science, while they tend to estab- 
lish the business on a sounder basis, do not make it easier 



DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 153 

in the sense of better adapting it to the novice or to men 
of low capacity. Agriculture is rapidly becoming more 
difficult, calling not for less but for more, of brains, of 
knowledge, and of executive ability, and as such it is rap- 
idly challenging the attention of the brightest men, who 
will be attracted into the calling about in proportion as 
they can feel the possibility of reasonable profits. 

No business can hold the respect and the service of men 
of ability unless it affords them a reasonable reward for 
what they put into it, and certainly no occupation can com- 
mend itself to ambitious young men until it offers promise 
of a good and reliable income. 

In this connection it is most significant to note the in- 
creased respect for agriculture and the new interest in 
farming and in country life that commenced to spring up 
among all classes almost immediately after the work of the 
college and experiment station began to show how to put 
this business on a scientific and paying basis, and it is 
significant, too, that we now hear less and see less of the 
drift from the farm to the town, and that men of sound 
business sense and wide experience are beginning to look 
to the land and to agriculture not only as a safe business 
but in every way as a desirable occupation. This is the 
main influence that will regulate the flow from the country to 
the town and hold in check that insane rush of young men 
cityward that we have all deplored for these many years. 

2. An Agriculture Productive. It is not enough that 
agriculture should be profitable. In its development it 
must also become in the very near future enormously pro- 
ductive. How pressing this point will shortly become few 
people are able to realize, so abundantly have the virgin 
soils of this country produced in the past, so boundless 
have been their extent, and so small has our population 



154 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

been almost up to the present day. A little careful con- 
sideration, however, will speedily show that conditions in 
this respect are to undergo a fundamental change in the 
very near future indeed. 

Under good conditions, the human animal can double 
his numbers every twenty-five years. By the aid of im- 
migration and despite the ravages of four wars, we have 
maintained this rate of increase in this country since the 
Revolution, and the population of the United States doubled 
four times in the last hundred years. If we maintain this 
rate of increase for another century — and something is 
wrong if we do not — if we maintain this rate of increase, 
we should have in this country a hundred years from now 
no less than twelve hundred millions of people, a hundred 
millions of whom should live in Illinois. Under these con- 
ditions not less than thirty millions should live in the state 
of Maine, — that is, the population of the entire United 
States at the time of the Civil War would then be crowded 
into a single one of our smaller states, and that within the 
present century. 

For various reasons this ratio of increase cannot much 
longer be maintained, yet it is the natural rate, and it tends 
to show us what would come about under normal conditions 
within a century, — and what is a century in the life history 
of a people ? 

Believe me, race suicide if it comes will be due not to a 
failure of the birth rate : it will be from our sheer neglect 
to maintain conditions that will insure food for the people. 
This is the form of race suicide against which we need most 
to protect ourselves, and it is none too soon to begin. The 
world has not yet learned how to feed such a population as 
is just ahead and before the present century is ended the 
largest single public issue will be that of bread. 



DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 155 

Within the lifetime of children born to-day, scarcity of 
labor will be a matter of history, and abundance of cheap 
food will be a tale that is told by the grand'ther in his chim- 
ney corner dozing in his dotage. We are educating in our 
schools to-day a generation of children to live a life that we 
ourselves have never seen and that history does not record, 
and we do well if we soberly calculate what their conditions 
of life are likely to be and mend our methods accordingly. 

We were three hundred years in getting a population of 
five millions of people, so slowly do numbers pile up when 
the base is small, whatever the ratio, but we have increased 
ninety millions in the last hundred years. With such a base 
and with modern conditions of life, this country can and will 
produce men at a rate the world has never seen. We can 
now produce in this country as much increased population 
in the next twenty-five years as we produced in the whole 
four hundred years since its discovery by white men, and we 
can produce twice as many more in the next twenty-five. 
In fifty years from now we shall have the population of 
China in this country, unless something goes wrong, and it 
is the business of agriculture to learn how to feed them, 
and feed them well. When it has learned this, it will have 
learned many a lesson the colleges do not now know how 
to teach. 

We have thought but little on these things because all 
of our experience has been with an insufficient population 
and we have even courted immigration as a source of labor. 
Had you thought of it.'' with our present population matured 
we can in ten years duplicate every emigrant dead or alive 
that ever touched this country. We have never yet been 
conscious of our population as far as adults are concerned, 
because we have had room and food and labor in superabun- 
dance. But we have never had to deal with such numbers 



156 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

as are just ahead, the whisperings of whose coming may be 
found in the housing and the teaching of our now enormous 
child population. When Chicago calls for eight milHon 
dollars' worth of additional public school buildings in the 
next two years, you hear from a tide of young humanity 
whose numbers and reproducing powers will make new 
problems for our race and for its agriculture to solve. Not 
the least of these will relate to the power of the land to 
produce food for man and the animals he has domesticated. 

Aye ! for the animals — there is another rub. We revel 
now in the luxury of animal life. Every family, on the aver- 
age, has a horse, four head of cattle, four sheep, and four 
pigs, with some few millions to spare. They literally work 
and eat and root for us, and we consume their bodies and 
their body products with a prodigality that no dense popu- 
lation has ever yet found possible. Now animal service is 
an expensive luxury when food becomes costly. Animal 
food is approximately ten times as expensive as vegetable; 
that is to say, it takes ten pounds of grain to make a pound 
of flesh, which is no more valuable for supporting life than 
is any one of the ten pounds of grain that went to make it. 

Our descendants will face the day when they must sur- 
render some of this animal life as surely as they face the 
day of their birth, and when we consider the fact that eco- 
nomic nitrogen production involves leguminous plants that 
are fit only for animal food, we will begin to see how compli- 
cated is the problem of developing an agriculture sufficiently 
productive to meet coming requirements without distress. 

3. Alt Agriculture Permanent. The conditions that 
have just been discussed will not be temporary and tran- 
sient : they will be enduring, yes, permanent, and they 
must be met by a permanent agriculture — a thing the 
world has never yet succeeded in establishing. No race 



DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 157 

has ever yet learned to feed itself except at the expense of 
the fertility of their own or of some other country. Other 
races have had to meet this problem and have gone down 
under it. 

Where is Carthage to-day ? Where is Egypt, whose 
civilization once flourished upon fertility brought down from 
the highlands of a great interior ? What of Palestine, that 
once flowed with milk and honey and blossomed as the rose, 
but now supports only a miserable and straggling popula- 
tion of wandering Arabs ? What of Babylon, amid whose 
** heaps " the jackal snarls where once kings held revelry 
and where civilization was born in the richest river valley 
in all the earth ? What of India, where struggling millions 
maintain their racial existence at the cost of periodic and 
decimating famine relieved from other regions that have 
not yet met the " Great Issue " } What of China .? With 
a population of four hundred to the square mile, it must 
presently either move, adopt new methods, or starve. It 
is pointed out as a people who have solved in some un- 
canny way the problem of a permanent agriculture and a 
permanent food supply, yet good authority says that on 
the highlands are regions once " peopled and now aban- 
doned, where for stretches of ten miles no man lives. 
- What of England 1 She is a new country, yet she long 
ago faced failing fertility and built fleets of ships to carry 
guano from the South Sea Islands, exhausting within the 
recollection of men now living those natural beds which 
the seabirds had been ages in producing. Not only that, 
she has brought mummies from Egypt to fertilize EngHsh 
soil that the Englishman might have his beef, though 
already bread riots wage from time to time in London. So 
narrow is the margin on which English agriculture is main- 
tained that good judges say that the law of primogeni- 



158 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

ture is the only condition that makes beef production still 
possible in England. 

Our Federal Government announces the newly discov- 
ered theory that lands do not wear out, but the fact remains 
that large sections of Old Virginia are so worn as to be 
abandoned, and families that once entertained presidents and 
foreign diplomats, now that the wheat yield has dropped to 
ten or twenty per cent of its former magnitude, eke out the 
income by keeping summer boarders. 

Every intelligent man knows that the old cotton and to- 
bacco lands of the South are badly worn and have lost for- 
ever their power of spontaneous production. That great 
grain-growing region in southern Illinois, known locally as 
" Egypt," covers an area large enough to make ten such 
states as Rhode Island, but much of it was sufficiently ex- 
hausted, so far as profitable agriculture is concerned, by 
two generations of grain farming, that some of the land be- 
came in local parlance " too poor to raise a disturbance." 
It is fortunately being rapidly restored by methods devised 
by the Experiment Station, but the saddest fact is that the 
effects of soil impoverishment had in some cases gone so 
far as to affect the people, and they were unable to raise 
even the small initial cost of restoration, in which case, of 
course, the problem must go over to men of capital who 
had sojourned on more fortunate lands. 

Not only does all this have a bearing upon the problem 
of a permanent agriculture, but added to this is the fact that 
our "boundless prairies" with their "inexhaustible fertility" 
are found upon examination to be surprisingly short in 
phosphorus. 

If we lack nitrogen, we know now how to get it from the 
inexhaustible supplies of the air by the use of leguminous 
crops. If we lack potassium, the natural deposits are ap- 



DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 159 

parently unlimited, but when we lack phosphorus we are in 
need of a commodity which exists in usable form in but 
exceedingly limited areas on the earth and yet which is 
absolutely essential to the production of food. 

Considering all this — considering, too, the fact that at 
the present rate of consumption all the American deposits 
of high-grade phosphate rock will be exhausted before the 
end of the present century, and considering our own over- 
whelmingly increased need for food in the very near future, 
I am constrained to say that in the interest of self-protection 
and the founding of a permanent system of American agri- 
culture, the annual exportation of a million tons of phos- 
phate rock to Germany ought to be stopped, by constitutional 
amendment if necessary. 

No man can study for a moment the entirely new con- 
ditions and problems that will confront our people in the 
immediate future without realizing that the establishment 
of agricultural colleges and experiment stations was the 
largest act of foresighted wisdom in recorded history, nor 
can he fail to realize that their adequate maintenance and 
fostering support is not only the first duty but one of the 
highest public privileges of the commonwealth of our day 
and time. 

There is to be, in the near future, a struggle for land 
and the food it will produce, such as the world has never 
yet beheld. He who knows where and how to look can 
see it coming. The African activity among western Eu- 
ropean nations is a part of it. It is always cheaper to 
move than to stay when over-population and failing fertility 
threaten a shortage of food — provided there is any place 
to move into ; that is, provided we can dispossess the 
other party and his land is worth the contest. 

However that may be as an abstract proposition, for us 



i6o EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

there is no more moving. For us there are no more " new 
worlds." For us there is little more " Out West." Our 
fortune and our future, whatever they may be, are staked 
down on the American continent. Literally "here we 
rest," and whether we like it or not, we must devise and 
establish a permanent agriculture here or go down in the 
attempt.^ 

Our descendants will certainly be as cultured as we; 
they ought to be more so. Their needs surely will not be 
fewer or of a more modest character. Their numbers will 
be vastly greater, and unless we^ not they^ can succeed in 
founding a permanent agriculture, the race will degenerate 
and end where it commenced, in poverty and barbarism. 

I have already pointed out that restorative and perma- 
nent systems must be established before the people are in 
distress for the necessities of life. It is we who must dis- 
cover and estabUsh this permanent system. There is no 
time to be lost, for we do not yet know how to do it and 
a stupendous population is just upon us. It is none too soon 
to attack with all the scientific vigor of all the Experiment 
Stations of all the states this problem which will shortly bear 
harder upon us than upon any contemporaneous race in 
the world except the Hindus and the Chinese, who have 
almost certainly delayed too long and lost their chance. 
European nations will be occupied for generations yet in 
exploiting Africa and perhaps South America, and we 
before any other modern nation must face the issue of a 
permanent agriculture in its own country. 

We have no right to dodge this issue now while we are 
few and young and wealthy. It is our own descendants 
whose lives and happiness we literally hold in the hollow 

1 Since the above was written a fleet of steamers is announced as put in service to carry 
Argentine beef to New York. 



DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE i6i 

of our hands, and he who shirks that responsibility is guilty 
of a crime against his race beside which ordinary treason 
is trivial ; and when we are called, as we are, to the task of 
establishing if we can a permanent agriculture, it is a call 
of the race for a chance to live and work out its destiny. 

So much for what may be called the business side of 
farming — an agriculture that is reasonably profitable, 
highly productive, and certainly permanent. What now 
on the human side.-* What is the development of the 
farmer as a man to match the development of his busi- 
ness as an occupation } And so I come to the next count 
in our series of development. 

4. Tke Country Comfortable. Agriculture is not only a 
business, it is a mode of life as well, and if it is to be 
successful in the latter particular it must in the end afford 
its devotees the same comforts of life as are obtainable in 
other occupations. This has not hitherto been possible, but 
its early realization is becoming every day more promising, 
and if the colleges and stations perform their whole duty 
in this direction, and if they are supported by the people, 
as they ought to be supported, then one of the earliest and 
most distinctive developments of our agriculture will be 
in " creature comforts " on the farm. 

This development will largely take the special form of 
modern conveniences, including labor-saving equipments in 
the farmhouse. The farmer has provided himself with all 
sorts of machinery and ingenious mechanical devices, not 
only to cheapen production, but to make labor easier for 
himself, his hired help, and even his animals. In the 
meantime his wife gets on with few improvements and 
with no real conveniences, living and scraping along as 
best she can against the day when the family shall build 
its home in town and "have the conveniences." By 



i62 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

modern conveniences are generally meant bath room and 
toilet facilities, a lighting system, and running water inside 
the house. That is about all, but it would take a book to 
recite what has been sacrificed in going to town to get 
these things. 

For this the farmer has abandoned his business. He has 
broken up his children's home. He has exposed his little 
ones to the unbridled dangers of the small town. He has 
set before them the example of idleness. He has turned his 
back upon the farm that has made his wealth and stripped 
the land of its fertility to build in the town the home to 
which the farm was entitled. He has stripped the country 
of its earnings to buildup the city and add to its numbers an 
essentially useless and undesirable population. So common 
has this thing become as to excite public alarm, and no one 
topic rings a more significant note through the findings of 
the Country Life Commission than the abandonment of 
the farm at the stage of house building. 

The uselessness of all this under even present conditions 
was, I think, first called to public attention in an address 
by Mrs. Davenport at the Illinois Farmers' Institute at 
Peoria in February of last year. She had had an exten- 
sive experience on the farm and had lived a good number 
of years in town. With a natural mechanical instinct and 
some experience in building, she saw how thoroughly the 
conveniences and the labor of the house had been over- 
looked, relatively speaking, by both inventor and designer, 
except where conditions of life, as in the city, compelled some 
decent attention to sanitary measures, evolving the bath 
room, the toilet, and the slop sink. She saw how completely 
the labor of the house had been left to servants in the 
homes of the wealthy or endured by the wife unable to 
afford a servant, neither of which conditions was favorable 



DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 163 

to the development of conveniences for performing the 
household labor. This comparative poverty in house equip- 
ment is also partly due to lack of attention on the part 
of inventors and activity of manufactures, all of which is 
traceable to another initial abomination — that ancient 
and dishonorable custom by which the husband carries 
the pocket-book and so often opens it only upon humili- 
ating supplication for a share of what the wife on the 
farm has fairly earned. 

Mrs. Davenport knew that conditions had commenced 
to mend themselves in certain particulars and were capable 
of still further improvement. Accordingly, she set out to 
learn how far and to what extent the farmhouse can now be 
equipped, not only with the so-called modern conveniences, 
but with still further devices for saving labor. The results 
of her study as given in the address already referred to 
may be briefly summarized as follows : — 

The enterprise of the best farmers in equipping the farm 
with machinery has already reached the stage of the small 
gasolene engine for running the machinery of the barns, 
and especially for pumping water, generally into small or 
elevated tanks subject to freezing, an evolution from the 
old and unreliable windmill. 

Beginning at this point with the gasolene engine, which 
stands as a kind of connecting link between the machinery 
of the farm and that of the house, it appears that this little 
engine, first of all, can pump water, both hard and soft, 
into the Kewanee or other automatic system and secure a 
pressure of 70 pounds per square inch in air-tight tanks 
standing in the basement or buried in the ground beyond 
the reach of frost. This is as good as the best city pressure, 
and is abundant to throw water over any of the buildings, 
carry it into both house and barn and near-by fields, and 



l64 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

put both hard and soft water, hot and cold, on all the floors 
of the house. It will also run a water motor — cost, six 
dollars — sufficiently powerful to operate the washing ma- 
chine and do the principal part of the hardest job about any 
home — all for six dollars under pressure. This same engine 
can run a gasolene heated mangle with a capacity of a 
napkin a minute or a tablecloth every six minutes. It can 
also operate a storage battery electric light plant. Not only 
that, it can furnish the power for the churn and other small 
machinery ; and last of all, it can operate a vacuum cleaner 
system whose installation in the private house is now en- 
tirely feasible. 

Besides this, the soil absorption system will care for the 
waste from bath room, laundry, and slop sink as completely 
and as satisfactorily as the best city sewer. If economy is 
imperative, acetylene or gasolene may be substituted for 
the electric lights, or if electricity is used, the small ma- 
chinery may be operated by electric motors. 

Here we have water pressure, bath and toilet room, a 
lighting plant, power laundry machinery, vacuum cleaner, 
with all that any city home can secure in the way of 
modern conveniences and more than can be had there, 
except with difficulty, for city residences commonly do not 
possess a source of power, — all this, as well as in the city 
and better. 

I was amazed, optimist though I am, at the results of 
this investigation into the possibilities of the independent 
plant, and at what can be done, not in the future, but now^ 
in the equipment of the farm home with the conveniences 
of human life. 

But, you will say, think of the expense ! Yes, it is 
costly; all good things are costly. Farm machinery is 
costly, especially a reaper that is seldom operated ten 



DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 165 

days out of the year and lasts on the average but three 
years. It is all costly, but remember that we are talking 
about a class of people who ride always in covered car- 
riages, drive good horses, and are able to go to town to 
live?- 

Now an entire bath room outfit can be bought and in- 
stalled for the price of a single covered buggy and will out- 
last the buggy half a dozen times over. The vacuum 
cleaner, that acme of comfort and luxury, will cost the 
price of a good horse or a medium team. Yes, it is costly. 
The whole outfit will cost a thousand dollars, perhaps 
twelve or fifteen hundred with the engine, depending upon 
the size and grade of the outfit. 

Yes, it will cost just about what a city building lot will 
cost in any town worth living in and not on a principal street 
either. In other words, the moment the farmer moves to 
town to secure "modern conveniences," he "planks down" 
at the outset for a building site as much money as it would 
take to provide all these things and more on the farm he 
has left behind. Then, in addition, he will need to draw 
generous quarterly checks for water rates, gas bills, electric 
lights, and invest from two to three thousand additional for 
income to meet the extra cost of taxation. 

Many of the choicest physical blessings are inherent in 
country life, such as good air, plenty of room, open sun- 
shine, and comparative freedom from dangerously infectious 

1 Five years have passed since these words were written, and we should now write 
" automobiles " instead of " covered carriages." What is here sketched has been more than 
realized on many farms in many states, but within this brief period even greater changes 
have taken place along other lines of expenditure. It has been a money-making and money- 
spending period, in which luxury has too often overridden comfort, as shown by the fact that 
thousands are to-day riding in automobiles who have not yet provided bathrooms in their 
homes. The automobile is a good piece of farm equipment, but it is not to be compared in 
permanent and practical worth with the modern equipment of the home, where the family 
spends most of its life, and where health and convenience and comfort should be given the 
first consideration. 



i66 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

diseases. Others are being rapidly added, such as the 
telephone, which is both better and cheaper than in the 
city ; the rural delivery of mail by which the farms are 
better served than are most towns, and the consolidated 
secondary school by which the farmer's children may re- 
ceive literally from the father's roof the best education in 
the world. 

When we have learned to build comfortable homes for 
ourselves and our children, then will the country be of all 
places for living the most delightful and the most desirable 
from the greatest variety of standpoints. 

5. The Country Beautiful. Time and space are all too 
short for saying all that ought to be said about the human 
side of agricultural development, but I shall steal a word 
and a moment to enter a plea for the country beautiful ; 
something to please the eye and uplift the soul ; something 
beyond the body ; something that shall foreshadow here 
what heaven may be hereafter. 

First of all, I plead for the early evolution of a suitable 
country architecture : for house and barn exteriors that 
shall blend with the natural features of their surroundings. 
We build a barn on the ugliest lines that human ingenuity 
can devise, often "go the limits" by painting it red, and 
then wonder why it is so often struck by lightning. 

Let the country house be built on good lines within and 
without. Let it be generously and hospitably big, with 
broad low roof and wide projection. Let it be surrounded 
by porches wide and deep ; and inside, let the rooms be 
generous and the stairways broad. Let the colors every- 
where be strong but soft, and outside let it blend into its 
setting of lawn and trees as if this home had been builded in 
a spot which Nature had made expressly for the place 
where a family might live and where children might be 



DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 167 

born and grow up and go out into the world to engage in 
and succeed in many things, but never to forget the child- 
hood home of blessed memory. 

This is a sentimental side of our business, I know, but 
after all, sentiment is the strongest thing in the world, and 
you and I may not know the racial asset of a dozen gen- 
erations born and reared in such homes as may now be 
established on the farm. 

It is traditional to assume a plain, hard life, destitute of 
comforts, for the family on the farm. In this we err. 
Nothing is farther from the essential. We cannot build 
and maintain a permanent agriculture on that proposition. 
In such an assumption we confuse the necessary hard- 
ships of the pioneer with the possibilities of the open 
country. 

Farming and pioneering started off together, and the life 
of the pioneer farmer was hard, not because he was a farmer, 
but because he was a pioneer. Nature was unsubdued. 
Men and women were poor, and life was hard at the best 
when necessities were counted luxuries. But those days 
are over on real agricultural lands, and farming is coming 
into its own. There are non-agricultural lands where 
country life will continue hard, but this is not American 
agriculture. These are not farmers.^ 

Look for American agriculture on agricultural lands and 
you will find it in any state of the Union. Here pioneering 
and farming have parted company forever. Farming will 
go its way on its own plan, and if you look for it here, you 



1 No greater mistake can be made than by assuming that every inhabitant of the country 
is a farmer. The man who lives in the hills and obtains a precarious living by a combination 
of hunting, fishing, and loafing is no more a farmer than is the peanut peddler on the street 
corner a merchant. Men are first of all countrymen and citizens from choice of habitation ; 
after that comes the question of occupation. This is why the millions living wretchedly in the 
congested city can never be moved upon the land. 



i68 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

will find it a thousand years from now. I wonder what it 
will be like ? The people then will be our descendants — 
yours and mine. I wonder what they will think of us, and 
how they will record history between now and then. I 
should like to be well thought of by them, for they ought 
to be a very superior people, and they will be if we are all 
wise, for what they are then will depend not a little upon 
what we do now. 

Let us at once set about building country homes that 
shall last for generations. Let us give them plenty of 
room, with broad lawns and much grass. Let there be 
some flowers and shrubbery to add a touch of brightness, 
but above all, let there be trees , trees ^ long-lived trees ^ that 
will tell the children of the future that their grandfathers, 
who are we, took thought for them. Let the whole picture 
have its setting in a natural frame of forests and of hills, 
of fields where cattle be, of meadows and lakes and run- 
ning water. So shall we build, and in this way also leave 
our best thoughts behind. So will the farm at last come 
into its own. 

6. The Country Educated. I now come to the last, 
which is also the greatest of the separate features of agri- 
cultural development. I refer to the education and the 
culture of the men and women who shall live upon the land 
and till our soil — it is ours and not theirs — who shall think 
our thoughts as we cannot think them amid the stress and 
strain and struggle of the city ; who shall keep the country 
as the great breeding ground where children may grow up 
into men and women without that prematurity and that 
dangerous sophistication that mark so many of the city 
born and bred. 

This matter involves the whole philosophy of agricul- 
tural education, both of collegiate and secondary grade ; in- 



DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 169 

deed, it covers a large part of our educational effort, for it 
involves the education of nearly half our population. 

Agricultural education is but a feature, albeit a large 
and important one, but none the less it is a feature of our 
system of universal education, and the spirit and purpose 
of our system of universal education, as I understand it, is 
this : so to educate all men as to make them first of all self- 
supporting and useful contributors- to some feature — no 
matter what — of the public good; and second, to encourage 
and develop in their several personalities the best that is 
in them as human beings and members of a rapidly advanc- 
ing society whose capabilities, if not unlimited, are as yet 
unknown. 

Universal education is an attempt to make the most not 
only of the exceptional man, but of all normal men, the 
masses of whom really represent the race and limit its 
achievements and advance. As nearly half the people live 
by farming, the problem of agricultural education shoulders 
approximately one half the problem of universal education, 
at least so far as numbers go ; moreover, it is the half that 
will have more than its share to do in fixing the future of 
all classes. How shall agricultural education be conducted 
so as to meet these broad requirements felt alike by farmers 
and all other members of our social body ? 

First of all, agricultural education must be so conducted 
as to make the farmers efficient in a business way. It has 
taken more than a generation to begin to find all that is in- 
volved in this single feature of education for the business 
of farming, and few men yet realize that, of all forms of 
education, that in technical agriculture is the most costly 
if it is made good enough to be really worth while. The 
young man does not want to study about cattle : he 
needs to study cattle themselves ; a distinction not yet 



170 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

observed, I am sorry to say, in some of our institutions of 
learning. 

Young men who are fitting themselves for farming want 
not a mass of information about present day agricultural 
practice ; that will pass, and it ought to pass. It is com- 
paratively easy to teach, but it will be out of date and gone 
before it can serve a man now in school as a definite guide 
to procedure. What he wants from a business standpoint 
is instruction in the principles involved in agriculture so 
far as they are known and in methods of investigation after 
the unknown, that he may keep himself intelligent as this 
great business of agricultural development proceeds before 
his eyes day by day. 

Furthermore, they want this, not in the university only, 
accessible merely to those who may go to college, but they 
want it and must have it in every high school, that it may 
be accessible from the home. They want it not in a few 
congressional district schools separated from everything 
else educational, but they want it wherever men from the 
country seek an education, and they want it associated 
with all the other subjects and where other men are edu- 
cated. All this is extremely difficult for both teacher and 
student, and it involves an expense for skilled men, for 
equipment and for research, such as is not yet appreciated 
by anybody, much less by public men. 

Teachers and investigators who have skill in this line 
are few and their services are extremely valuable, so valua- 
ble that the state which fills its quota with the best must 
stand ready to pay teaching salaries such as have never yet 
been paid. They must also devote money to equipment and 
facilities for research to an extent which makes all that has 
yet been done look microscopic and miserable — all this 
must be done if this development of agriculture is to pro- 



DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 171 

ceed along all these lines as fast and as surely as it ought 
to proceed. 

So much for the technical side : for what a man must 
know if he is to occupy the soil of the public domain to the 
best advantage to himself and to the state. Because of what 
I am about to say and lest I then be misunderstood, let me 
remark before passing, that I am a stickler for technical 
education both collegiate and secondary and for agricul- 
tural research of the most strictly technical character 
beyond anything that any man has ever yet dared to 
propose. 

But that is not all. There remains a human side to 
agriculture. The farmer is not only a tiller of the soil ; he 
is a man and a member of our permanent society; moreover, 
he is a voting member of the body politic. This is only 
another way of saying that as a man he possesses inherent 
privileges for himself and owes therefor substantial duties 
to the community quite outside and beyond the. limits of 
his vocation and his education. 

So I enter a protest against that philosophy of education 
and that system of schools which would by design or by 
necessity confine the education of a farmer or of any other 
man, industrial or non-industrial, to the limits of his voca- 
tional and business needs, and I protest against the estab- 
lishment of separate agricultural schools in this country for 
the same reasons that I protest against the exclusion of 
the farmer from good society or from any other common 
interest of American development. 

Every man is, or ought to be, bigger than his business. 
He does not and should not be so educated as to live for his 
business. He is in business that he may live, and the large 
question — the largest of all questions before any man — is, 
what shall he do with himself.-* what shall he do with the 



172 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

result of his earnings ? what shall he do with his leisure ? 
how shall he justify his existence ? He has a right to be 
so educated as to answer these questions, which are final ; 
to be in business for something other than to conduct busi- 
ness or to while away the time. 

A good part of the education of the farmer as of other 
men is, or should be, non-vocational, and of such character 
as shall best suit his individual tastes and surroundings. 
It will be history and economics for one, philosophy for 
another, language and the classics for a third, music, paint- 
ing, or some other form of art for others — I care not what 
it is, provided it is something, that develops human facul- 
ties outside vocational needs, and if only it serves to 
broaden rather than to narrow, which is the inevitable 
consequence of exclusive technical training. 

I therefore enter a plea and a demand for the broadest 
possible views regarding agricultural education. The 
farmer as a man is not different from other men unless we 
make him so by our education, and if we do the time will 
come when other men of other classes will share with him 
the consequences of a shortsighted and inadequate system 
of education for industrial purposes. 

A scheme for the education of farmers in separate 
schools is being industriously advocated in these days by a 
class of educators who seem to feel that a little education, 
and that almost exclusively technical, is sufficient for farm- 
ing purposes, and that the European peasant school is 
a model. The advocates of this sort of school overlook 
certain important features of agricultural education and of 
the philosophy of education in general : they overlook the 
fact that the prospective farmer should be educated as a 
man as well as a farmer ; in other words, that the farmer's, 
like every man's, education should include both the tech- 



DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 173 

nical and the non-technical, both the vocational and the 
non-vocational. 

They overlook the fact that we cannot safely educate 
separate professions in separate schools, for to do so is to 
build up distinct classes, each educated for and prejudiced 
in its own affairs and against the world. 

They overlook the fact that there is a great body of 
knowledge that can form the background and the backbone 
of the education of all men for all pursuits, and that this 
is our chief reliance for holding our people together as one 
people. 

They overlook the highly educational influence of mere 
association with other men as secured in universities which 
fit for all the affairs of life. 

They overlook the capacity of the American secondary 
school still further to broaden its curriculum and widen its 
educational influence. This thoroughly unique American 
institution is abundantly able to reflect in its atmosphere 
and its class rooms the same cosmopolitan influence 
that constitutes the chief distinction of American uni- 
versities. 

They overlook the fact that our high schools are not 
" city schools " wholly given over to the affairs of the city. 
They are schools of the people in the best and highest 
sense of the term, willing and able to reflect all the major 
interests of the people of their respective communities, 
and to denominate as a " city school " every school in a 
village of 2000, and therefore, as a school where agricul- 
ture presumably should not be taught is, to say the least, 
un-American. 

They overlook the fact that to establish separate agri- 
cultural schools of an inferior grade for country people 
would fail to serve with the education best suited to their 



174 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

need that large element of the country-born that is not 
adapted to farm life. 

They overlook the fact that the European system of 
education was evolved after distinct social classes had been 
established by generations of political and economic influ- 
ences whose repetition in America it was the special pur- 
pose of our Puritan forefathers to prevent. 

They overlook the fact that in America the country peo- 
ple have not yet been peasantized, but that so far we are a 
homogeneous people except for immigration, which is prin- 
cipally a city and not a country problem. 

They overlook the fact that to educate farmers by them- 
selves in separate schools almost purely technical and dis- 
tinctly inferior both in breadth and intensity to the high 
schools in which other classes are educated — that to do 
this thing is to peasantize the farmers more rapidly and 
more completely than they were ever peasantized in Europe 
or than would be possible by any other method that could 
be devised by the ingenuity of man. 

They overlook the fact that to peasantize the schools 
wherein farmers may be educated is to peasantize the 
farmers themselves, the first effect of which is to put 
them out of sympathy with other classes, and the other 
effect will be to limit their very ability as occupants and 
managers of the land and their economic efficiency as 
farmers, after which will be due and payable to men of all 
interests and all classes the social and political conse- 
quences of this proposed educational sin. 

They overlook the fact that this sort of educational phi- 
losophy, extended to its conclusion, would demand that all 
men be educated exclusively to vocational ends, each class 
in its separate schools, out of touch and out of sympathy 
with the rights and ideals and ambitions of other classes, 



DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 175 

the only final consequence of which is social chaos and 
political anarchy, because if our people are once broken up 
into classes according to occupation, they can never again 
be amalgamated. . 

They overlook what has been achieved in universities, 
wherein men of all conceivable purposes are educated both 
separately and together in a common atmosphere of demo- 
cratic wholesomeness. 

I would have Americans so educated that in a company 
you cannot tell by the dress, the language, or the manner 
of a man what his occupation is. 



CHAPTER XI 
THE MEANING OF AGRICULTURE 

Introduction 

Every man may fairly ask himself this question : What 
concern is it of mine whether agriculture succeeds or not ; 
for what difference does it make to the banker, the mer- 
chant, the manufacturer, to the clerk, the teacher, and the 
preacher, to the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick 
maker, whether crop yields are abundant or meager; 
whether the farmer is rich or poor, learned or ignorant, 
wise or foolish; whether his home is comfortable or 
destitute ; and whether his family is cultivated or boorish ? 
Aside from general humanitarian considerations, what 
difference does it make to anybody but the farmer whether 
agriculture is prosperous or not ? 

This is a fundamental question that lies at the root of 
many matters. Answering it, I should say that every 
difference to everybody is involved in the proposition 
whether or not we are developing an adequate agriculture, 
and a typical American citizen on the farm ; for if we are 
not, then no man is so intrenched or so obscure but the 
mistakes and shortcomings of the farmer will ultimately 
find him out. If the food supply is short, unreliable, or 
expensive, everybody suffers, the farmer last of all. If 
conditions of country living are inferior, the farmer suffers 
first, but he ultimately involves all classes in his misfortune. 

176 



THE MEANING OF AGRICULTURE 177 

The Importance of Agriculture 

Except among students of economics, agriculture, like 
other common things, has been regarded usually as of 
slight consequence when compared with the more spec- 
tacular or unusual activities of life, and it is only in the 
present century that anything like a widespread interest 
in or appreciation of our fundamental industry has mani- 
fested itself. 

This traditional attitude of indifference toward farming 
is philosophically and scientifically wrong, because any 
common thing must be of fundamental importance to the 
race or it would not be common. In the primitive state 
of society everybody is a farmer — or a hunter — which 
amounts to the same thing. As society becomes organized 
and industries differentiated, the number needed to secure 
food is reduced and an increasing proportion of the people 
can be released for other service.^ But with all the aid 
of animals and of machinery, a full third of our people are 
directly engaged in farming, and this appears to be about 
the proportion needed. Now an occupation that com- 
mands the services and the lives of a third of the popula- 
tion must be full of meaning, both economically, socially, 
and politically; and manifestly it cannot be neglected 
except to the direct injury of great masses of people and 
ultimately to the common hurt of all classes. 

Let no man for a moment forget that farming is the 

^ This is why the percentage of farmers in America is gradually decreasing and that of 
other industries increasing, as it should. In our grandfathers' day everybody was a farmer, 
for there were yet no cities. Why should we expect the proportion of farmers always to 
remain lOo per cent, and why should we deplore the advent of other industries, providing 
agriculture is not prevented from rendering adequate service ? No, our troubles are not 
inherent in the growth of other industries ; but if anywhere, they are in the non-development 
or the wrong development of farming. Despite what is said to the contrary, the develop- 
ment of city occupations is a sign, not of decadence, but rather of progress, and of an 
advancing, not a retrograding, civilization. 



178 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

production of food and that food is the largest fundamental 
fact in life. Every man, woman, and child must eat every 
day^ winter and summer, in season and out of season, and 
I every mouthful of the food must come out of the ground. 
"pLet crops fail for a twelvemonth and the world would be a 
f vast cemetery — nothing more. The land and the farmer, 
therefore, are basic elements not to be ignored, for we must 
exist before we can do or be anything worth while. More- 
over, a hungry man in any age is a savage, and the first 
step in civilization is literally to feed the brute and to keep 
him fed. In a very immediate and perfect sense our civili- 
zation and the exercise of our higher faculties are condi- 
tional upon ample and suitable food. 

We cannot, however, take food for granted, as we do the 
sunshine and the rain. It is not showered upon us, nor 
does it grow spontaneously, but it must be produced with 
great labor. Indeed, more than half of all the toil, thought, 
and exertion of the earth are expended in the getting of 
something to eat. So difficult is it to secure food that no 
race, nor even city, has ever solved the problem of insuring 
enough for all its people. 

Beside food all other necessities dwindle and luxuries 
sink into insignificance. There is no crime in the calendar 
that men will not commit for food, because with hunger 
comes not only distress but also a blunting of the faculties, 
and as long as any considerable proportion of our people 
are underfed, the house of our social family is yet upon 
the sand. 

TAe Evolution of Agriculture 

The process by which farming develops from hunting 
and the ways in which civilization is influenced by the food 
supply form a fascinating chapter in early human history. 



THE MEANING OF AGRICULTURE 179 

It has been oft rewritten — centuries ago with long for- 
gotten races and only yesterday with our Indians, the 
South Sea Islanders, and the African tribes. The varia- 
tions are many, but the essentials few, well-known, and 
easily sketched. 

The scene is generally laid on the river bank or the lake 
front, for water affords the best primitive means of travel. 
Here live in tribes these human animals — this raw material 
out of which the higher races develop by the slow processes 
of evolution. For natural reasons a slight division of 
labor is established between men and women, for man is by 
instinct strongly carnivorous, and as with other animals, 
his only occupation is getting food. It is the men who pro- 
vide the game and beat off rival tribes that encroach upon 
the hunting grounds, but it is the women who maintain the 
camp, care for the young, and dress and prepare the game 
that is brought in. 

But hunting is a precarious means of subsistence, and 
frequently man after man straggles into camp empty- 
handed, tired, and hungry, perhaps in an ugly mood be- 
cause of the fine specimen that escaped by a hair. When 
things go well, the feast may be followed by revelry and 
recitations of prowess, but no man is joyous on an empty 
stomach and nobody sings of defeat. Against contin- 
gencies such as this the women provide fish from the river, 
berries in season, tender roots and shoots, nuts of trees 
scattered through the wilderness, and seeds of tall grasses 
growing on the bottoms. Everything is acceptable to an 
empty stomach, besides affording a welcome variety even 
when meat is abundant. Moreover, fruits may be dried 
and together with nuts and seeds, stored for the winter or 
other time of want that is certain to come. 

Accordingly the favorite berry patches and nut-bearing 



i8o EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

trees are located, preempted by squatter sovereignty, and 
defended against all comers, by a trial of strength if neces- 
sary. Thus is war early extended to women and to chil- 
dren, who learn from their mothers their first lessons in 
both verbal and physical contest. 

Down by the river, where the grasses and the tender 
herbs grow, the weeds and the bushes are cleared away in 
order to give valuable vegetables a better chance ; and in 
the clean fresh soil left behind by the winter floods, seeds 
are sown and carefully tended to increase the certainty 
and the amount of the food supply. Thus women were 
the first farmers, and fruits, vegetables, and seeds of tall 
grasses were the first crops. 

As these agricultural operations develop, the supply of 
food becomes more abundant and, what is more important, 
more reliable. The growing crops afford a favorite object 
of attack and require constant guarding. The winter stores 
become larger and exceedingly attractive to less provident 
but none the less hungry neighboring tribes. They must 
be protected at every cost, hence fortified villages and in 
time walled cities appeared. It is easier to steal a man's 
dinner than to take his life, and if his stores are spoiled, he 
himself is destroyed, and thus it was that the fiercest wars 
were waged about the growing crops and the winter stores. 
Thus arose the ancient and honorable occupation of war, 
and it is still true in the last analysis that our wars are 
waged around food and the land to produce it. 

But as we fight fire with fire, so is aggression the best 
method of defense, and instead of simply guarding the 
stores, it was found advantageous to raid and clean up 
a considerable area around every center of habitation such 
as has been described. 

In this way the Iroquois within recent times not only 



THE MEANING OF AGRICULTURE i8i 

built palisades about their homes and granaries, but every 
summer dispatched raiding parties as far north as Canada, 
as far west as Illinois, and as far south as the Carolinas, 
and by waging wars of practical extermination effectually 
protected themselves during the growing season by a wide 
belt of uninhabited territory. Thus was war made honor- 
able and thus was justified in a way much that would 
otherwise now pass as plain cruelty. 

Even slavery had its early compensations. From the 
first, women had the hard side of life — the drudgery of 
camp, and the abuse, if not the contempt, of the stronger 
man ; indeed, the early savage knew but one more satis- 
fying method of revenge than to kill his adversary, and 
that was to take him home and turn him over to the tender 
mercies of the women and children for torture. They in 
turn could invent no more, refined torment for a warrior 
chief than to make him " work like a woman." Thus the 
emancipation of woman dated from the day when her 
savage mate brought home the captured enemy and turned 
him over to his wife for a slave. After that, man and 
woman had interests in common. So slavery, the first 
step toward the emancipation of woman, was also the first 
step in civilization, and whatever trouble it afterward 
made, it was worth to humanity all it cost. 

Enough has been pointed out in this hasty sketch to 
show, first, that originally the quest of food required all 
the time and energies of man; second, that women were 
the first farmers ; third, that the necessity for food was 
the original cause of war; fourth, that cities necessarily 
grew up where agriculture furnished an abundant food 
supply ; and fifth, that the first lessons in leisure and 
equality followed upon slavery, the result of warfare that 
saved the enemy's life for the labor that was in him. 



i82 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

As food becomes abundant in the evolution upward, 
some of the people can be spared not only for war, but 
for manufacture, and a surplus of goods arises. From 
manufacture, therefore, first came barter, then trade with 
an army to protect the caravan, and so on up to the 
modern complicated conditions, about which we all know 
but among which we do not easily distinguish the funda- 
mentals from the accessories that have been added as we 
have developed. Difficult as it may be, it is important for 
teaching purposes that we always be able to recognize and 
single out the fundamental elements and activities in 
human affairs, no matter how complicated conditions may 
have become, for experience shows that we are prone to 
lose perspective and to take for granted many things that 
come onlv with human blood and the sweat of the brow 
of some man long forgotten, but none the less a hero. In 
this way we now take for granted much that was bought 
with a price. In this way, too, we cherish many an insti- 
tution like slavery, which in its time played a necessary 
role but long outlived its usefulness. 

There remains only in this connection to point out that 
back at the beginning, in the hunting stage, if the animals 
happened to be large and of the grazing kind, dependent 
for grass upon summer or winter rains, then the game 
would migrate with the season and the tribe must follow, 
in which case no plantings could be established, no cities 
builded, and nothing would tie the people to a definite 
spot. Such a tribe would remain as nomadic as the game, 
and land could have only a passing value as affording 
temporary pasturage. 

Such people became herdsmen, dwelling of necessity in 
tents and, beyond defending the herds, leading a lazy life. 
Manufacturing could not develop, neither could commerce 



THE MEANING OF AGRICULTURE 183 

or any settled form of government ; that is to say, under 
these conditions man has never risen above and cannot 
rise much above the self-sufficing stage of existence. Such 
was the condition of our prairie Indians who went down 
under the onslaught of the whites working from an assured 
base of supplies. 

Such was the condition of the early Israelites when 
Abraham quit raising cattle for the Babylonian market 
and started off into the wilderness to found a nation. 
The limits were soon attained, and within three gener- 
ations the tribe was obliged to seek food of a settled people, 
the Egyptians, incidentally to acquire knowlege and culture 
by the hard process of slavery, and in the end to preserve 
their very existence as by a miracle. 

Such was the evolution of society, but the original and 
primitive fact still remains ; namely, that food and its 
getting overshadow all other considerations, employing 
one-third of all the people in its production, and requiring 
nearly one-half of all the human energy, experience, and 
training. 

The Balance of Trade 

To the civilized, therefore, as to the savage, food is the 
first great consideration, and it is only in a highly organized 
society like our own that we lose sight of fundamentals 
and begin to take our breakfast for granted. This is be- 
cause in some way not well understood, it has to most of 
us always appeared upon the table at the proper time. 
Let us not be deceived, however ; the line that hitches us J^ 
all to the plow is not very long, nor is it very indirect in its 
attachment. 

As food is fundamental in life, so it is fundamental in 
commerce, and we have always relied upon bumper crops 



i84 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

to hold the balance of trade in our favor. When, however, 
we become so numerous as to consume all we can raise, 
what then is to take care of the balance of trade ? 

It is more difficult to hold this balance through manu- 
factured articles than through primary necessities, such as 
food and lumber — commodities which all the world must 
have in fairly standard form and in fairly constant amount, 
and when we can no longer rely upon farming to hold this 
advantage, then we shall learn the true meaning of real 
competition in the markets of the world, and then we shall 
begin to realize how much agriculture has done for us in 
the past besides merely feeding us. 

When we come to the time wherein we shall attempt to 
hold this balance of trade through manufactured goods, 
then we shall be truly competitors in the world's markets, 
and the task of upholding American standards of living 
will have just begun. I would have you realize, if you can, 
how much we have in the past depended upon the virgin 
fertility of American lands, and that too without being con- 
scious of the real source of our strength or even very 
grateful to the medium through which it has come to us — 
the farmer and his land. 

Many of our popular writers do not know that the fertile 
lands of England, Germany, and Denmark owe their rich- 
ness largely to the fertility shipped abroad in our own ex- 
ported corn, cotton, and linseed meal, and to our phosphate 
rock, of which Germany now takes over half the product 
of our mines. It is not too much to say that the civiliza- 
tion and indeed the cities of modern Europe have been 
built up largely by the products of other lands, chiefly 
American. 

The principle was well illustrated by a remark made to 
the writer some twenty-five years ago by that pioneer 



THE MEANING OF AGRICULTURE 185 

English experimenter, Sir Henry Gilbert. At that time 
we were shipping both corn and cattle to England in large 
amounts. He said : " As long as you Americans are will- 
ing to sell us your fat cattle for the cost of herding and 
your corn for the cost of planting and harvesting, throwing 
in the fertility in both cases, we shall get on very well, but 
when you learn, as you sometime will, that you are thereby 
depleting your lands and begin to keep your corn at home, 
feeding it to your own cattle and retaining the fertility upon 
your lands, then God pity the British farmer." Such were 
the words of the sage of Rothamsted a quarter of a century 
ago, and his prophecy is beginning to be fulfilled, for we 
have already begun to feed our lands, and when that once 
becomes the common practice we shall be through mining 
out and giving away what has been our most valuable 
asset ; namely, the virgin fertility of lands that have been 
thousands of years in the making. So much has farming 
done for us and for others in our trade relations. 



The Ultimate Condition 

In the evolution of society it is in every way better when 
the methods of food production become so organized and 
improved that a large proportion of the people can be re- 
leased from the primary business of hunting food and left 
free to follow other callings. This highly desirable con- 
dition is only recently beginning to be realized. In our 
own fathers' time nearly everybody was a farmer living on 
the self-sufficing plan, and the only manufactures were 
those of the home, employing the spare time not required 
in the more serious business of getting food. It is only 
recently that we have been able to engage in manufacture 
systematically. 



i86 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

Now that one-third of the people can feed the whole, 
the other two-thirds are free to manufacture, to trade, to 
teach, and to engage in the thousand and one activities 
indispensable to the complicated life of a highly developed 
race. All this is to the advantage, not only of society, 
but of the farmer, because those who are not producing 
food must buy it, not only making a market for the surplus 
of the farm, but affording an incentive and a means for 
developing agriculture out of the old self-sufficing systems 
in which each family undertook to produce only enough 
to " bread it through," into the higher condition of a pro- 
ductive industry, viz., farming for money by selling the 
product, not merely the surplus. In this way farming has 
been developed into a business. 

This being true, we can have no sympathy with the oft- 
repeated assumption that the times are out of joint because 
a smaller percentage of the total population lives on farms 
than in the early days when no cities had yet developed 
and when every man was a farmer. This so-called drift 
from the country to the town is of itself perfectly normal 
and in every way desirable, providing four conditions are 
not violated : — 

1. That the numbers going to town are not dispropor- 
tionately large, giving rise to scarcity of labor in the country 
and to enforced idleness in the city. 

2. That the intelligence, morality, and thrift of those 
left behind is not reduced by the exodus ; that is to say, 
that the exodus represent a fair assortment, not a debili- 
tating draft. 

3. That no great proportion of those moving to town 
shall be of the land-owning, leisure class who are simply re- 
tiring from productive activity. Such families in any large 
number are only a parasitic menace to society. 



THE MEANING OF AGRICULTURE 187 

4. That the drift to the town be ultimately offset by a 
counter drift from the city to the land — a movement 
already well set in and from certain points of view alarm- 
ingly large. 

Measured by these conditions there is some cause for 
concern, but little for alarm. There is shortage of labor in 
the country at certain seasons and some overplus in the 
cities. Both are natural and to be expected when we 
reflect that many people not themselves resourceful abhor 
the quiet of the country, that the city is the natural Mecca 
of the derelict, because chances of employment there seem 
numerically greater, and last of all, that agriculture is not 
an ideal employer of labor, its operations being decidedly 
seasonal. 

There is no evidence that the most desirable people are 
deserting the country in disproportionate numbers at the 
present time, whatever may have been true a generation 
ago, when the sorting process began under the abnormal 
conditions immediately following the Civil War. By all 
accounts at the present time the people of the country are 
fully the equal of those of the cities, certainly if we are 
considering averages or future prospects. 

The sudden rise of land following the extreme and rapid 
development of industries other than agriculture has 
enabled many landowners to move to town, the impelling 
influence being to secure superior educational advantages 
for the children — an entirely laudable purpose and fully 
justified as a temporary expedient, providing it does not 
spoil instead of educate and does not create a permanent 
leisure class of land-holding citizens, renting to tenants 
predestined to peasanthood. The protection at this point 
is the country school, which for safety's sake must be made 
and kept the equal of the city school, even if it takes both 




i88 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

state and federal aid to do it. The child is a prospective 
citizen, not of his community alone, but of his state and 
nation, and the general public must see that his education 
be not inferior because of the mere accident of birth. Here 
again the school holds the key to healthy progress. 

The important duty of schooling cannot be left to the 
community, for often the community is not free to act — a 
condition illustrated by a remark of a certain Southern 
farmer who is reported to have said, " My niggers are not 
going to school and that settles it " — " my niggers " being 
his tenants. Nor is this different in effect from the 
attitude of many a Northern retired farmer, who turns up 
at school meetings that he may oppose better schools for 
the children of his renters, while his own young people are 
riding in automobiles and spending money like water. 
Both spell disaster at some time. 
v| Until recently all trails led to town, but now a counter 
icurrent has set in, and it appears to be altogether healthy. 
Almost half the students in our agricultural colleges come 
from cities of over five thousand. Many of these are the 
older sons of the land-owning families recently mentioned 
and represent real country people only temporarily city 
residents for the purpose of education, but many are in no 
sense country people, as is shown by the fact that 12 
per cent of the agricultural students of Illinois are from the 
city of Chicago. That these students are mostly headed 
for the land is shown by the fact that over 70 per cent of 
the graduates are actually upon farms, and that 95 per 
cent are working within the field of agriculture. 

This is substantially true everywhere. All over the 
world thinking men of all classes are now regarding agri- 
culture as never before, and a profound readjustment as 
between city and country is taking place. Dr. Sato, recent 



THE MEANING OF AGRICULTURE 189 

exchange professor from Sapparo, tells me that in Japan 
almost half the agricultural students come from the cities 
and towns. In India a son of the Hindu poet, Tagore, 
recently a graduate of the agricultural course of the Uni- 
versity of Illinois, is giving his personal attention to the 
family lands in a way hitherto unknown in that part of 
the world. 

The Need for Rural Credit System 

It looks, therefore, as if we of this country need as yet 
feel no great anxiety about the exodus to the city, except 
as it may represent a permanent leisure class depending 
for its support upon the earnings of land left behind. 
This possible condition, moreover, must be watched, and 
herein lies the real reason for a rural credit system whereby a 
landless young man can enjoy some chance for acquiring 
land. It is a matter of surprise that so many well-informed 
men see no need of a special land credit system. They 
say that the farmer has not asked for it and that he can 
already borrow under the most favorable terms. 

So he can if he be a landowner, but it is not the land- 
owning class that is needing relief. How is the young 
man without money to secure land at two hundred dollars 
an acre with no system of credit but short-time loans at 6 
per cent ? We need, not so much as a favor to the indi- 
vidual as a measure of safety to society, a long-credit land- 
buying plan similar to that provided by the building asso- 
ciations, whereby payments slightly in excess of rent will 
ultimately acquire a title. 

Without some such plan landholdings will increase in 
size and home owners decrease, for with high-priced land 
under the present credit system an estate cannot be settled 
among its heirs unless it be put upon the market and sold. 



igo EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

The time has already passed when one of the children can 
undertake to "pay off the heirs," as the saying went a 
generation ago. The consequence is that the only possible 
buyer is a capitalist, in all probability a landowner already, 
seeking to enlarge his holdings and thereby increase his 
income by additional rentals. Such a system is bound to 
produce the conditions involved in the remark that seven 
men own Scotland, if indeed they do not invite the same 
conditions that now wreck Mexico. 

It is startling to reflect upon the fact that within the life- 
time of most people of middle age, land that was once to 
be had for homesteading or for a dollar and a quarter an 
acre is now practically out of reach of any but the wealthy, 
and that it will so remain until we have a change in our 
credit system, not in the interest of the land-holding farmer, 
but of the landless man seeking an opportunity of owning 
a home. 

This all seems far from our business as school teachers, 
but it is well that we understand somewhat the influences 
lying at the bottom of that most dangerous of all questions, 
— agrarian discontent. 

The Meaning of Land Tenure 

How large should a farm be and should the occupant 
own or rent it ? There is neither time nor space to discuss 
these questions in all their bearing even if I were able, 
which I am not, but there are a few issues upon which 
teachers should be informed'. 

As men differ in capacity, so farms should differ in size, 
and the fit between the two should be fairly good. To put 
a forty-acre man on a hundred- or a thousand-acre farm is 
not a good use of land and the public is not well served. 
On the other hand, to put a hundred- or thousand-acre 



THE MEANING OF AGRICULTURE 191 

man on a forty-acre farm is to cramp the business, to un- 
derwork the farmer, and to deprive the family of its natural 
advantages. The public also is deprived of what it might 
enjoy. In both instances the public suffers — in the 
former because the land is not well employed ; in the latter 
because a family is not fully supplied. The first illustrates 
the condition in England, where small farms are bought up 
and turned into hunting parks for the land-holding gentry ; 
the second illustrates the condition in the other island 
empire, Japan, where the holdings are too small for the 
best results upon the people. We cannot here discuss 
the questions of maximum production, but it is sufficient 
for the purpose to say that what is desired is not neces- 
sarily the highest absolute yields per acre, but rather the 
highest yields from the land consistent with the best wel- 
fare of the farmer and his family. 

Nobody knows whether the public is better served when 
the farmer owns his farm or when he rents it, though 
without doubt the man himself is better off as an owner. 
But from the public point of view one thing is clear : if a 
man owns more land than he can operate or than he de- 
sires to operate, thereby becoming a lease-holder, then he 
should become also a land manager, increasing production 
by virtue of his control, and not a mere collector of rents 
through an agent. 

If the farmer must always and everywhere be a renter, 
then the land had better be owned by the public after the 
theories of Henry George. Unless private ownership can 
mean something more than an easy life for a land-holding 
aristocracy, it will inevitably pass away, and the passing 
may be more sudden and violent than we might suppose. 
The man who owns land, whether it be much or little, 
owes an obligation to the general public in proportion as 



192 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

he affects the very conditions of existence by controlling 
the food supply. 

Not only that ; he is responsible also for the lives of the 
people who work the land. Everywhere with increasing 
population land has become so precious as to be beyond 
the possibility of ownership by any but the wealthy, and 
everywhere and always the owner has been hard upon the 
renter. Now if the owner is nothing but a tax-gatherer, 
he will one day be eliminated as a useless obstruction be- 
tween the producing and the consuming public. No 
family has a right generation after generation to levy trib- 
ute on the land and its occupants unless by superior man- 
agement it adds substantially to the production of those 
lands and to the happiness of the people. 

Better farming can be done with capital than without it, 
and it is possible for owner and tenant by working together 
to be mutually benefited thereby and incidentally to serve 
the public better than by exclusive individual ownership. 
If this is to be, however, certain principles must be under- 
stood and practiced. 

1. It must be a share rent, which divides the risk, and 
not a money rent, which throws all the hazard upon the 
party least able to bear it, thereby reducing the grade of 
farming that will be carried on, besides increasing individ- 
ual bankruptcy and poverty. 

2. The lease must protect the land in its fertility and 
its full producing power, for no generation, whether land- 
lord or tenant or both combined, has a right to exploit the 
soil and leave it worn and depleted for the next. The 
coming generations will be more numerous than the pres- 
ent. They should be more cultivated and they will doubt- 
less have greater needs than ours. We must not cut them 
off while they are yet unborn. 



THE MEANING OF AGRICULTURE 



193 



3. The lease must run for a period of years in order to 
insure that stability which is necessary to business pros- 
perity and to the successful rearing of a family. 

4. The owner should install and maintain a decent 
home and pleasant surroundings as part of the equipment. 
The farm, whoever owns it, will be raising children. In 
justice to the hard-working wife and mother, in justice 
to the boys and girls, in justice to the public, whose citi- 
zens they will shortly be, this farm must not be less 
desirable as a place in which to be born and to live simply 
because the owner and the occupant do not happen to be 
the same person. The problem is difficult, — that I know 
both by observation and by experience, — but the owner 
and the tenant have this to work out together or one day 
the public will take the matter in hand and settle it on 
general principles. 

5. Collateral with the lease must go the joint obligation 
of landlord and tenant to maintain as good schools as if 
the owner worked the land. The children and the public 
generally must not suffer by the accident that the land is 
operated as a joint enterprise. 

These considerations lie heavy upon every owner of 
land, whether he bought it at a price in the twentieth 
century, whether he secured it by homesteading it in the 
nineteenth, or whether his ancestors obtained it by con- 
quest in the fourteenth century. Ownership of land is 
justified only when accompanied by some kind of real 
service to the general pubHc, and that service in my opinion 
can be greater with private than with public ownership. 
But we have much to learn. Because the landowner, large 
or small, is in a position to render peculiar service if he 
will ; because as many men as possible should own their 
own vine and fig-tree and the roof above their heads; 



194 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

and because of the divine effect of ownership and the 
general weakness of humanity, I would have a credit 
system which would make ownership of real estate as easy 
as possible, not as difficult. 

The People of the Farm 

When we remember that farming engages the lives of 
a third of all our people and that they live in the country 
with all it may mean for good or for evil, the full signifi- 
cance of the human side of country life begins to come 
home to us. If farming conditions are not to be com- 
fortable or humanizing or elevating or educational, then 
our general civilization is bound to suffer constant and 
ever-recurring dilution from the untoward elements born 
into it. 

If the people of the open country are not what they 
ought to be, then the land will not produce its best, the 
body politic will be sick at heart, and civilization will go 
limping forward with a ball and chain about its heels. 
But this can only come about from a general disregard 
of the meaning of the situation. If the cities, which are 
the centers of progress, choose to ignore, despise, or ex- 
ploit the country, they can do so in the future as in the 
past. In this country it was not possible until now, for 
land was abundant, but from now on it is possible, and 
the proper development of the land and her people is a 
general problem that rests equally upon men and women 
of all classes. 

The city is not only the center of progress and of life; 
it is also the natural whirlpool that gathers and holds the 
unsuccessful and the desperate people of all classes and 
of both sexes. Foredoomed to extinction, leaving on 



THE MEANING^ OF AGRICULTURE 195 

civilization only a sore while they live and when they are 
gone a scar in the shape of ill-begotten and worse developed 
offspring, largely degenerate and a burden upon society 
until natural selection shall weed them out, these derelicts 
are a perpetual menace. Extremes do not so often meet 
in the open country. The highly specialized in all direc- 
tions go naturally if not necessarily to the city, many of 
them to distinction, some to extinction. While it cannot 
be proved, I confidently believe that of all the people that 
shall occupy this country a thousand years from now, 
more will be directly descended from the one-third that 
occupy our farms to-day than will count their descent from 
the two-thirds who live in our cities. 

For many reasons it is undoubtedly true that in general 
the country is the breeding ground of the race. It has 
many and powerful facilities for affording normal develop- 
ment, but we are not to be deceived ; it has no means of 
putting into a race that which is not there already. Sun- 
light, free air, fresh fields, beautiful landscape, inspiring 
views, — all these are exhilarating and mightily powerful 
in developing character and inspiring ideals, but they are 
not hereditary, and if the soul is lost out of the race, they 
will be powerless to restore it. 

Believe me that in the long run the people of our race 
will be no better than the people on the farms ; and that 
always as now the country will afford the most favorable 
of all opportunities for establishing and maintaining those 
conditions of life which, upon the whole, are best calculated 
for the development of man and his highest civilization. 
Here is humanity unadulterated by its most vicious elements. 
Here is temptation reduced to the minimum. Here, with 
but half the attention bestowed upon the cities, are health 
and prosperity. Here is the normal man at home sur- 



196 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY 

rounded by normal influences. See to it, all whose busi- 
ness it is, that in this day of rapid development, the farmer 
be not left behind in any particular, especially in his 
education. 

The country is the natural home of industry and thrift, 
twin brothers to competence, morality, and happiness. In 
the country we sow what we expect to reap, and we reap 
what we sow, whether it be grain or tares. Moreover, 
every man sows and reaps, not another's, but his own that 
God has given him as a reward for his labor. Thus early 
and continually is a wholesome lesson well taught. By 
any count the typical American citizen lives in the country 
and on the farm. He is practically the only man that is 
free even in a democracy, and on him will one day fall the 
burden of maintaining the balance of power for righteous- 
ness in the conduct of public affairs. 



ll 



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